Paris

Paris is the closest of all of them, barely over an hour, and the only one worth crossing for a single dinner. Forget the postcard; the city that rewards a weekend is the one between the Marais and the Rive Gauche, the table you couldn't get at home, the room, the show you'd otherwise have read about. You arrive for one perfect evening and stay for a slow Sunday, the kind of two days that asks nothing of you but your attention. The monuments will keep. The reservation won't.

We fly here because some weekends are a single, deliberate thing: one room, one show, one table, and Paris is close enough to go for exactly that. At barely over an hour, the city stops being a trip and becomes an evening you happened to spend abroad. Some places you visit; Paris you simply go to, for one night, and come home better for it.