Paris! It evokes images of beauty, tranquility, reverence, history. For our kids, this was a must-take holiday, so this past week we traveled to Paris for half term (and Henry’s birthday). When we take a holiday, it’s generally not relaxing. Often we need a holiday from our holiday. Paris was no exception.

Despite the terrible rains, we toured museum after museum. And I tracked it all on Foursquare, with each check-in getting logged to Google Sheets automatically via an IFTTT recipe. This allowed me the chance to test out the new Google Sheets connector in Tableau 10 as well as the improved Mapbox integration.

Tableau Public isn’t running the beta yet, so for now, this image will have to do. It was quite the trip! 26 places visited in a just five days (though this does include food places). One day our kids will appreciate this adventure they’re on.

This week my wife and I took the kids on holiday to Paris for the first time. In our heads we pictured beautiful, sunny, warm Paris full of outdoor activities, baguettes and warm croissants. But Mother Nature had other plans and dumped tremendous amounts of rain on us. We literally watched River Seine rise and by Wednesday morning, she had begun to breach the lower banks. On Friday the Louvre even closed and had to move many pieces of art from its basement.

As I arrived the airport Friday morning for my flight back to London, I downloaded historical rainfall data for Paris and put together this Tableau story. The news story have made the floods sound terrible, and they are, but I wanted to know how terrible the floods are in historical context.