I attended the Olympics as a regular person. Here's what the surprisingly easy and cheap experience was like.

When my husband and I decided to retire, we devised a plan. We wanted to rent out our home in California and visit the UNESCO World Heritage city of Guanajuato.

I’m cheering from the banks of the Seine in a plastic rain poncho, my dress soaked and loafers sloshing. The rain has not let up once during the four-hour Opening Ceremony, but as we watch boatloads of beaming athletes float past us one by one waving their national flags, my smile could not be wider. By the time the evening comes to an end, Celine Dion is belting Hymne a l'amour from a glittering Eiffel Tower—some in the crowd cry, others dance, or FaceTime family—and a contagious sense of universal joy ripples across Paris.

Paris est une fête! Especially during the Olympics. The French title of Hemingway’s legendary memoir A Moveable Feast is an apt encapsulation of what can only be called a dramatic vibe shift in the French capital in the last few weeks. Indeed, Paris is a party. The opening ceremony elated even the most hardened of local skeptics of the Olympic Games—locally: les Jeux Olympiques, the JO. Since then, the city has been suspended in a Disney-esque euphoria; the JO is now a multi-week carnival of good cheer.

Beyond Simone Biles going for gold and the opening ceremony, one of the most talked about aspects of the Summer Olympics in Paris is the athletes village — and one of the biggest hotel companies in the world is in charge of maintaining it all.

As a travel writer specializing in tropical destinations, I've been lucky enough to have visited 30 islands around the world. Because of my extensive travels, people often ask me which islands I'd return to.

Like many TPGers, I've been sucked into credit cards with annual fees, but when I'm out and about, I use just two credit cards in my daily life.

Minister of Tourism, Hon. Edmund Bartlett, departed the island for Paris, France yesterday (August 7) to attend the Olympic Games. While in Paris Minister Bartlett will be instrumental in promoting Jamaica as a premier tourist destination through the Jamaica Tourist Board’s (JTB) Jamaica House initiative.

School was out, and we were in holiday mode. Buzzing with excitement, we headed to Heathrow Airport, our destination, Dallas, where my sister, husband, and three teenage daughters live.

During the Olympics, I typically find myself cheering on the athletes from the comfort of my couch. I had always assumed seeing the Games in person was too expensive and logistically challenging.

Tropical Storm Debby made landfall in Florida as a Category 1 hurricane early Monday morning—causing wide-scale power outages, catastrophic flooding, and dangerous storm surges throughout the Big Bend region on the Gulf Coast. It has since been downgraded to a tropical storm.

Whenever I visit Saint-Rémy-de-Provence—which I do a few times a year to visit my parents, who retired here almost a decade ago—I roll out of bed every morning before 7 a.m., often feeling the effects of the rosé from the night before, and walk with my dad into town while the streets are still waking up. This is partly because it gets so hot here in the South of France, and partly because my dad is a creature of habit. The morning routine goes a little like this: a brisk stroll up the road to the Bar Tabac des Alpilles, where the owner Patrick brings out coffees (café express for my dad, café creme for me) and one of the other early morning regulars hands us a newspaper to thumb through.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Camille Fahrnbauer, a 26-year-old travel nurse from Georgia currently working in New Zealand. It's been edited for length and clarity.