The next morning we packed up our little tent, threw everything into the car and headed for Blois. The plan was simple enough: return the hire car, catch the train to Paris and spend our last few days there before flying home.

Returning the car went smoothly. Getting away from the car-hire office was another matter.

For reasons known only to them, the office was well out of town in an industrial area with no obvious public transport anywhere nearby. We asked if they could call us a taxi.

This did not go down particularly well.

The staff reacted as though calling a taxi was well beyond the normal responsibilities of a car-hire office and possibly required special authorisation from Paris. There was a fair bit of reluctance before someone finally picked up the phone. I found this slightly baffling. Surely we weren’t the first people to return a car and then want to leave.

Eventually a taxi appeared and dropped us at the station.

The train to Paris was quick and easy and before long we were standing in Gare du Nord with our bags, surrounded by people moving in every possible direction at once. I was looking around trying to work out where we needed to go when I spotted the Metro signs.

“Metro’s over there,” I said.

“I think we’ll get a taxi,” said A.P.

That should have alerted me immediately.

A.P. is a great believer in public transport. If there is a train, bus or tram available he will take it, even if accessing it requires a three-kilometre walk carrying luggage. The fact that he was volunteering to pay for a taxi should have told me something was wrong.

It didn’t.

We climbed into a cab and headed across Paris towards the Port-Royal, a small family-run hotel in the Latin Quarter that A.P. knew from previous visits.

A few minutes into the journey he opened the window.

I looked over.

He was looking decidedly green.

By the time we arrived at the hotel there was no doubt about it. We checked in, made it upstairs to our room and A.P. headed straight for the bathroom, where he started vomiting.

And continued vomiting for the next few hours.

This wasn’t quite how we’d planned to spend our first afternoon in Paris.

I was sent off to find a pharmacy and returned with electrolytes and whatever else the pharmacist thought might help. After that there wasn’t much to do except sit beside the bed reading while A.P. slept and occasionally made another trip to the bathroom.

By the following morning he was much improved, although not yet ready for serious sightseeing. We took it easy for most of the day and by late afternoon he announced that he wanted pho.

A very good sign.

There is something about a big bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup when you’ve been ill that seems to put the world back in order. Fortunately Paris has a sizeable Vietnamese community and we weren’t too far from an area where finding pho was easy.

He ate the lot.

After that, and another decent night’s sleep, he was back.

We had lost a day, so the following morning we headed out early to make the most of the time we had left.

First stop was the Louvre.

There is no sensible way to see the Louvre in a morning. The place is enormous, housed in the former royal palace, with gallery after gallery filled with Egyptian antiquities, Greek and Roman sculpture, decorative arts and paintings by just about everyone you have ever heard of.

We did our best.

Like everyone else, we went to see the Mona Lisa, along with what appeared to be several thousand other people who had all had exactly the same idea.

The crowd around her was extraordinary.

Once we had seen her, however, things improved considerably. Most of the people seemed reluctant to wander too far away from that particular room, so we escaped into the rest of the museum where it was much easier to move around and actually look at things.

From there we walked across to Notre-Dame, sitting on the Île de la Cité in the middle of the Seine.

It is one of those buildings that is so familiar from photographs that you feel as though you already know it, but the reality is much more impressive. The great twin towers dominate the front of the cathedral, with the huge rose window between them and layer upon layer of carvings across the stone façade.

Inside was cool and dark after the bright day outside, with soaring columns, high vaulted ceilings and light coming through the stained-glass windows. We wandered through for a while before heading back out into the streets.

Next came Montmartre and Sacré-Cœur.

This involved going uphill.

A lot.

A.P. did not suggest a taxi, so clearly the pho had worked.

Sacré-Cœur sits right on top of Montmartre, its white domes visible from all over Paris. The area around it was busy with tourists, street performers, artists and people sitting on the steps looking out across the city.

The view from the top was worth the climb.

We wandered around Montmartre for a while, through the narrow streets and little squares, before eventually making our way back towards the hotel.

That evening we didn’t go far.

There was a small bistro directly across the road from the Port-Royal serving classic French food, so we went there for dinner. It was exactly my sort of place — nothing fancy, just a little neighbourhood restaurant, a glass of wine and good traditional food.

I loved it.

And suddenly that was it.

Our holiday was over.

It had been quite a trip.

We had started in Rome, then travelled north to Venice, where I took a walk down memory lane and introduced A.P. to the city I had lived in for two years. From there we headed to the Cinque Terre, walking the trails, staying in little rooms and eating extremely well before arriving in Vernazza and discovering what seemed to be half the population of North America already there.

Then we crossed into France — Nice, Avignon, the Palais des Papes and the Pont du Gard — before picking up the car and heading west.

That took us to Sarlat and the Dordogne, where we went from a converted pigsty to a tent and spent several days exploring the villages, castles and countryside. A.P. knew the area well from previous trips, but for me it was all new.

From there we drove through Burgundy, then across to the Loire Valley to visit some of the great châteaux before finally reaching Blois and catching the train to Paris.

Rome, Venice, the Cinque Terre, Nice, Avignon, the Dordogne, Burgundy, the Loire and Paris.

Not bad for a few weeks.

The next morning we packed our bags and set off for the airport.

This time there was no taxi.

We walked from the hotel to the RER station carrying our luggage, which confirmed beyond doubt that A.P. had made a full recovery, caught the train out to the airport and boarded the plane back to Australia.

Holiday over.

Back to work.