France
Summer 2025
What I Remember
We flew into Nice with another close family and spent the first few days along the coast.
Monaco.
The Mediterranean.
Long dinners.
Late sunsets.
Everything felt cinematic.
From there, we drove north toward Mount Ventoux. Two days in the countryside before heading into Paris.
One of my closest friends, Eric, and I biked up Ventoux together. Then we stood on the mountain and watched the Tour de France race past us.
That moment is hard to explain.
If you grow up loving cycling, Mount Ventoux exists in a different category. It’s mythology. History. Suffering. Beauty.
Standing there in person, then watching the Tour come through for the first time in my life, felt surreal.
Absolute bucket list experience.
And somehow, that still wasn’t the best part of the trip.
Paris
Paris with kids is different.
You stop noticing landmarks and start noticing reactions.
Watching them go up the Eiffel Tower for the first time.
Walking through the Louvre.
Seeing Notre-Dame.
Boat tours on the Seine.
The Musée d’Orsay.
Long dinners that stretched late into the evening.
The city slows you down in the right way.
And then somehow we ended the trip watching the final stage of the Tour de France on the Champs-Élysées.
Another one of those moments that doesn’t feel real while it’s happening.
What Stayed With Me
I didn’t grow up taking trips like this.
Honestly, we barely traveled at all.
No Europe. No flights. No big vacations. We rarely even left Wisconsin. Most of our trips were simple weekends camping next to a farm pond for a night.
That was normal to me growing up. I never thought much about it at the time.
But somewhere during this trip, it hit me.
I was standing in places I never could have imagined seeing as a kid, with my own family beside me.
That mattered to me more than anything else on the trip.
More than Monaco.
More than Paris.
Even more than Mount Ventoux and the Tour de France.
The best part of the trip was watching my kids experience things I never had the opportunity to experience myself.
That feeling stayed with me.
What It Was
Perfect.
Not because everything went smoothly.
Not because every moment was planned.
Because for a few weeks, life slowed down enough to fully take it in.
The coast.
Ventoux.
Paris.
The Tour de France.
Friends.
Family.
A long way from where things started.
Chad Kase