There were 64 worn wooden steps on the charming narrow circular stairs that climb to the fourth floor apartment we rented in Paris. Every day I said to myself, “Feet, don’t fail me now.”

I’m a walker. I dance. I do cardio. I’m in pretty good shape. On some vacations I get accused by my lagger companions of doing a forced march. I expected to walk equally strong on this two week trip to France, striding with purpose and vigor, like those chirpy leaders of tour groups stabbing their umbrellas in the air and urging all their chickens to keep up.

But this time my body was forced to do more strolling and stopping. My feet hurt. I grew blisters. I should have packed my trusty tennies, as I was reminded by my husband, the man who covered France in hiking boots. But who wants to take on Paris in tennies?

The stylish French sported complicated gladiator sandals and tall boots to go with flirty tunics over skinny pants and tights. Their legs looked good. Their feet seemed to work fine. They clicked along sidewalks and galloped up and down Metro stairs without wincing.

I wore Moleskin and Dora the Explorer bandaids from my granddaughter’s stash that I found in my purse.

Before the trip I shopped at a healthy shoe store in California for the ideal walking shoes. I asked for something that would be good for walking cobblestones as well as city streets and the clerk said “you mean our go-to-Europe shoes” and produced a pair of dusky green Mary Janes (Clark’s) that were in the dorky-but-hip category. I wore them for a week before I left, in order to break them in.

But by the second day on vacation they were not my friend. Yet I pushed on. We walked up Montmartre and back down. We walked through cheese markets and art stalls, through museums and churches. In Notre Dame I gratefully collapsed in a seat where I could prop my tootsies on one of the giant stone chiseled pillars.

French women use their feet and ride bicycles. I watched a Parisian peer in stylish dress and no helmet point her bicycle into the chaotic traffic of the Bastille round-about. And she did it in high heels.

I came home recognizing two things. I have a body that still works, albeit one that better keep going to dance exercise, yoga and lifting weights. Also, if I want to keep seeing the world I have to put up with some discomfort. No pain, no Seine.

But I ask my sister travelers, what do you put on your feet to trek the world. And still look fairly chic when it’s time for an aperitif?

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The couple from Massachusetts waiting outside the Orangerie in the warm, green Tuileries Garden agreed it was a relief to be away from disasters. You could walk around Paris, said the woman, and almost think the world was fine. The restaurants had lots of business and the tiny sidewalk tables were full of coffee drinkers in the morning and wine drinkers the rest of the day. There were lines at the artisan gelato shop until 11 p.m. People even smoked cigarettes and sat in the sun like nothing bad would ever get them.

Except for the cigarettes, we joined in. That’s what happens on a vacation. You get to leave reality behind for a while.

And yet, there really is no full escape, as the French reminded us. A squat guy in a black T-shirt came up to us at the metro and asked if we were Americans. When we said yes, he said, “I’m worried about your fish.”

We had some sense of what was going on back home, getting an occasional glimpse of the news when we checked our email. Obama was getting clobbered by both sides. Tipper and Al separated. The worst was seeing the photo of that noble but doomed oil-soaked pelican on the front page of the International Herald Tribune.

Taking a news break was kind of like going to a film noir, leaving your seat to go get some Milk Duds and coming back to more death and disaster.

We did avoid TV except for joining the crowd in front of a giant screen full of tennis, set up in the square at the Hotel de Ville.

Then it was back to “pass the pate” and one more carafe of the vin rouge.

From the top of one castle or another throughout France you can see fairy tale panoramas of perfect little villages, soft winding rivers and fields of red poppies. They look like make-believe scenes you might set up around a train set.

The rich and powerful built their castles up high, said my husband, so they could throw rocks on the people coming after what they had. Castlenaud, a medieval fortress hugging the cliffs in the Dordogne River valley, is now a museum dedicated to the art of war in the middle ages. This is how people used to kill each other, with crossbows and cannon balls that blew huge holes into the enemy’s castle across the river. It was mean stuff but what those boys played with seem like slingshots compared to our modern war arts where we can take out whole villages by an airborne robot.

If we’d wanted reports on the latest body count in the current bloody conflicts there was a TV in the kitchen at our inn in the Dordogne where Madame Chantel in fiery red hair and orange robe assembled breakfast. But we were content to simply listen to the river running past her gardens. It’s called the Ceou which means “sky in the water” in Occitan, the old language of southern France.

One night we sat beside it with our innkeepers, who speak as little English as we do French, and discussed our oil spill. Jean Luc got out a U.S. map so we could show him the Gulf of Mexico and where the poisonous ribbon of oil was fouling the waters from Texas to Florida and Lord knows where else. He traced around Florida and pointed up the Atlantic coastline and we all shrugged helplessly.

At Dallas we got through customs, found our gate to take us to San Francisco and were greeted by the urgent face of Wolf Blitzer on a TV screen. Not quite ready for prime time, we turned the other way and went looking for a banana smoothie.

There are so many good reasons not to go to Europe this year. The ashy cloud out of Iceland is still hovering and who knows when another volcano might decide to erupt and mess up a two week vacation? It could rain in Monet’s garden. The baguette bakers might go on strike.

Besides, how can we indulge ourselves when the world is so volatile and the economy so insecure? We’re getting close to that fixed income part of life. Will we be spending money that we will one day wish we had?

Think how sad the dog gets when we leave. Think of all the email that will pile up. What if the house sitter forgets to water the tomatoes? What about our promise to be frugal and buy local?

There could be a terrorist on our plane. There could be one on the airporter getting us to San Francisco. There could be an angry, anti-American zealot lurking at the Marais café where we lounge with our au lait and croissant. There could be bomb-makers at the adorable inn in the charming Loire village with all the great castles.

Well, we’re going anyhow, calling it our “pensioners to Paris package.” Even though maybe we should be biking through Utah while our legs still work. Or spending two weeks working on a kibbutz or teaching English to kids in Malaysia.

The last time my husband and I went to France was during the Bush years when the French were still smarting over that dumb crack about French fries and embarrassed U.S. travelers sported maple leaf flags pretending to be Canadian. But now the French seem to be smitten with Obama and liking us again. And the dollar is no longer defenseless against the euro.

It still takes almost a day to get from our house to France and I look forward to that dazzling moment after flying all night when you push up the window shade and the sun is coming up over what must be Ireland and then England and then there’s the English Channel and a swath of green farmland and brown and white cows and stone farmhouses with blue shutters.

I’m still in love with foreign travel. I know people whose long careers had them airborne so much that once they retire they’re thrilled to hang out at home. Not me. I get giddy just thinking about going to another part of the world. We’re traveling with another couple and we’ve been playing at going to France since winter. If you only have two weeks to actually be there, you want to stretch it out with a long countdown. We have French radio streaming from our laptops, Paris weather on the Google map. I’m reading memoirs of France by Gertrude Stein, MFK Fisher and Julia Child.

The world has shrunk since those Americans discovered France as a second home. Travel was more exotic and distancing then. Now we are a global village with a world economy. We share airspace, cyberspace and each other’s bad days. Each of us is only a ripple away from another part of the world’s failed economy, earthquake, oil spills, violence, corruption, wars and retaliatory attacks.

We may be separated by culture and language – my French, as they say, (heh, heh) est pathetique – but we know each other. The storybook farmers we will photograph in the Dordogne worry about holding onto to their fields just like California farmers. The chic people we will ogle on the Right Bank likely fret over cutbacks at work and how to keep their apartment.

To them we will bring our tourist dollars, affection and empathy.