I returned home to a wire mesh Eames chair and a lovely mint green side table and flowers, flowers, flowers. A tiny Weber grill lurked under my desk. Simon and Kovick were perched on the bed in luxuriating cat mode, having apparently already adjusted to the new furnishings. Home sweet home.

But before that, a seven-hour plane ride in the middle seat of the middle section. Bad Kevin Costner westerns played on the televisions suspended in the middle of the aisles. To my left, a fellow read P.G. Wodehouse; to my right, a 17 year-old French boy read a French nudie magazine and fell asleep on my shoulder. As the plane approached JFK, he leaned in and asked, in French, for help filling out his customs form. My French on the trip had been stellar considering my four year absence from its study, but forming the question, Have you been around livestock recently? was a bit of a challenge.

I had arrived in the Charles DeGaulle airport at 10:30 AM after a blissful SAS flight from Stockholm. (SAS is the best airline in the world.) Ahead of me lay a seven hour layover. I could feel the tears welling up as I realized that one had to check in before one was admitted access to the seating areas, and one—meaning me—could not check in until three hours before departure time, a stifling four hours from then. I shuffled to the American Airlines ticketing counter and pouted until a clerk took me by the elbow and bullied me onto the next flight, departing in twenty minutes.

In Stockholm, old-world cobbled streets and tan stone facades were juxtaposed with blocks of same-looking apartment buildings and legions of beautiful tanned blonds. Water everywhere, fluent English, prices that required long division calculations. I considered purchasing everything I saw, especially housewares and textiles, but quickly realized that my apartment could never hold the sheer volume of Scandinavian design that I intended to bring home.

But before that, I scored a 79 Kronor ($10!) duffel bag into which I could repack my Parisian purchases and the Swedish ones to come.

Paris was a land of perfect shoes: store after store featuring delicate, round-toed flats. Thousands upon thousands of them! I started the first day there with a pair of silver flats with a tiny silver buckle, and chatted successfully with the clerk—who kindly taught me the verb “to try on” (essayer) and my size (trente-huit)—in my terrible French. I proceeded to purchase two more pairs of shoes, and would have surpassed a three shoe per day maximum if I wasn’t terrified of missing out on all the giant, milky café au laits and crusty, buttery breakfast baguettes. For lunch one afternoon, I ate a small belly-busting lump of spinach and what seemed like a thousand cheeses, all of it drenched in crème fraiche, with a dusting of paprika. I washed it down with a glass of red wine before Lina and I headed up to Monmartre to scale the stairs and gawk like good tourists.

But before that, I was just another American girl, stretched out on two seats on the six hour flight, listening to specially-selected transatlantic playlists on my iPod, dreaming about vacation.