A fabulous tour taken by some local choristers last year, which included visits to Vienna, Salsburg and Prague, led to an unexpected bonus, in the form of an invitation from the office of the Mayor of Paris for the choir to sing in two famous Paris churches.

The occasion was an apparently yearlong celebration in 2009-10 of the 65th anniversary of the Liberation of France in 1944-45, with many other choirs performing at Notre Dame Cathédral and Madelaine church.

Well, as it turned out the choristers who accepted the invitation weren’t all among those who had visited Austria and the Czech Republic — far from it.

Although the core of both choirs was the Headwaters’ Concert Choir, led by founder Rob Hennig, the other singers in 2009 were mainly from the Brampton Festival Singers (BFS), also directed by Mr. Hennig, whereas this year many were from Humber Valley United Church in Etobicoke, where the director of music, Paul Chant, is also accompanist for the BFS, and others included a few from BFS as well as the choir of Knox Presbyterian Church in Milton, where Mr. Hennig is organist/choirmaster.

This year’s assemblage, dubbed the Great Lakes Chorus, was also significantly smaller, thanks to the fact the tour came just eight months after the visit to Central Europe and was more expensive, at

3,500 per person, and that price didn’t include as many meals as we enjoyed last July.

Although the two choir tours were both educational and enjoyable, they also had lows along with the highs, and hopefully few lessons learned.

One was that an important element of tour planning is flexibility in travel arrangements. Last year, that planning was done professionally by International Music Tours, which suggested that the individual choristers should be able to decide whether to fly to and from Vienna by Air Austria or use a different carrier that might offer a better price and/or service. Thanks to superb efforts by Orangeville’s CAA outlet, some of us wound up with a significantly better deal with British Airways in terms of cost and convenience, involving smooth transfer at London’s Heathrow airport and an ability to return directly from Prague rather than have to take a 10-hour bus ride to Vienna.

This time, we trusted the planners and wound up with terrible transfers at Montreal’s Trudeau airport, while a few choristers who knew far better than the planners booked themselves on direct Air Canada flights between Toronto and Paris. They were able to leave Toronto much later and arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport only a few minutes after we did, and returned on a flight that left Sunday two hours before ours but got them to Toronto at 3:30 p.m. as we were preparing to land in Montreal for a nightmarish scramble to go through customs, collect baggage, be wrongly routed up some escalators, wait interminably for a security screening (that should have been unnecessary for a connecting Air Canada flight) and reach the departures gate just as boarding was set to start for a 7 p.m. departure that finally, after the plane had to be de-iced, got us to Pearson at 8:45 — more than five hours after our compatriots and half an hour before the first baggage surfaced.

But so much for the lowest of the lows.

Apart from the fabulous experience of performing at the two historic churches, the highs included getting to the top of the Eiffel Tower, enjoying a boat tour on the Seine, visiting the Louvre and several other museums, being accommodated in hotel that was superior to any of the three used last year, and a visit to Versailles on Saturday.

Almost as high a ranking should go to the weather. Although spring didn’t arrive on the calendar until we were leaving, it was there in fact, despite a cold spell earlier in March and 10-day forecasts which suggested most of the week would be spent using umbrellas and warm jackets. Instead, it was mainly sunny and mild, the rain coming mainly on two evenings and the outdoor temperature reading on our bus going as high as 22º C and never lower than 13º.

The grass was green everywhere, and by last Saturday the daffodils were blooming and we came upon a forest floor at Versailles that was covered with white wildflowers resembling tiny trilliums.

One warning for anyone planning to visit Paris: expect just about everything to cost a lot more than what you’re used to paying locally, even when a debt crisis in Greece and our soaring Loonie had cut to cost of a Euro to $1.37 Canadian on Monday, from about $1.56 last July.

The best value we came across was the Paris Metro, where a single subway ride costs 1.60€ (about $2.20) at a time when the Toronto Transit Commission demands $2.75 for a single fare and $2.50 apiece for multiple tickets or tokens. In Paris, 10 tickets can be bought from machines for 11.60€, or about $1.60 per ride.

As might be expected, we ate too much, even when on our own. The tour included breakfasts at our hotel, the Pullman Rive Gauche, that had just about everything, including crépes and real Canadian maple syrup one day. On the other hand, the scrambled eggs were almost tasteless and seemed to be machine-produced.

As usual, we had more than a few characters among the 60-plus who took the tours (the 40 choristers plus friends, relatives, etc.), and an excellent tour guide in Patrick, a well-travelled European (and Ph.D grad to boot) who maintained his good humour, no matter what befell him.