I’ve had some wonderful experiences traveling for my work, especially the last couple years as the fiance has been able to tag along.

It’s not all sunshine and roses. As I’ve mentioned, there is not much glamour when you travel for work and also commit the bulk of the trip to working–but there are the occasional trips where at least one of us has some down time or we’re able to tack on an extra day of fun with the laptops and phones turned off.

The fiance travels quite a bit for work–maybe once every month or so. At his last job, he was on the road two to three weeks a month. That was too much–he was exhausted on the weekends and always trying to squeeze everything into a couple days before hitting the road again.

We were living almost two hours apart for most of that so it made it difficult to spend much quality time together as well.

However, there were significant perks–namely, the airline/hotel/rental car points he accrued on a very regular basis. Those points (combined with my annual Delta Companion Certificate) paid, nearly in full, for a ton of our adventures the past five years:

• Cabo, Mexico
• San Francisco, Calif.
• West Coast Crawl (Calif., Ore., Wash.)
• Chicago, Ill.
• San Antonio, Texas
• Germany
• Boston, Mass.

You can do quite a bit of traveling when your airfare, hotels and rental vehicles are free, even when you’re right out of college and just starting off in your career.

The last couple years he was able to tag along with me for a couple of my work conferences in New York and Washington D.C. We didn’t have much free time, but we were able to add a day for exploration.

But now, for the first time in eight years, I’m finally able to tag along with him on one of HIS work trips! Unfortunately I can’t go for the whole thing, but I will take what I can get!

In June, he’s heading to Russia, Switzerland and France. The visa situation is a little outrageous with Russia right now–he’s been working on getting his for months–but it’s not a problem for me to join up with him in Geneva and then tag along to Paris. I’m a lucky girl!

I have been to Geneva and Paris before. I only passed though Geneva so I’m looking forward to the day and a half I’ll have to explore on my own there this time around.

But I’ve spent a couple weeks in Paris on two different occasions so I’m working on planning some day trips from the city while he’s at the Paris Air Show. I will have at least two days on my own while he’s working, and then he and I will have three full days together.

We will be repeating some of the things I’ve done before like the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Notre Dame, Arc de Triumph, Sacre-Coeur and maybe Versailles, but I know they will be brand new experiences watching him experience them for the first time. I also found some other neat things he will enjoy that I’ve not done before, like a bateau-mouche cruise on the Seine and La Lapin Agile, the oldest bar and cabaret in the city.

I started thinking though a couple day trip ideas, and so far I’ve come up with:

• Provins: Medieval UNESCO Heritage Site, which is only 1.25 hours away by train
• The Loire Valley: Train to Tours is only 1 hour and then you catch a bus tour to several of the castles
• The Champagne Region: Train to Reims is only 45 minutes and then you catch other transportation to the triangle of old cities

We also talked about going over to Luxembourg for a day. I thought I might head over while he was at the Air Show, but it sounds like he would really like to go. It would be a new country for me, which is pretty exciting!

Most exciting is getting to travel with him to places he has never been before and knowing I will have no phone or email the whole time, which means a true and clean break from work for the first time in years. Again, I’m a very lucky girl.

Any Paris day trips you suggest? Anything I should be sure to do in Geneva or Luxembourg?