Cas Wonsowicz has spent more than five decades in motion. Long before he ever thought of himself as a writer, he was building a career that took him across continents, through airports, into boardrooms, and occasionally onto the wrong train platform. His professional life with Unisys, Alcoa, and Intel Corporation gave him something that most business travelers never fully appreciate until it is over: the world, up close and unscripted.
He was the colleague who could always find the best local restaurant in an unfamiliar city. He was the traveler who, during a 2011 trip through Germany, made a series of confidently incorrect train transfers and ended up somewhere he had never planned to go. Those unexpected destinations, he would later say, turned out to be among the most memorable moments of the entire trip. That instinct, to find meaning in the unplanned, would eventually become the foundation of everything he writes.
In retirement, Cas did something most people only talk about. He went back to school, not for a degree, but for depth. He began studying art history, attending workshops, reading voraciously, and sharpening a lifelong curiosity into something more deliberate. When Oregon's Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston led a writing workshop through the Astoria Writers Guild in the fall of 2025, Cas found himself with a story he could no longer leave untold. The result was Learning Paris: Discoveries Along the Seine, his debut book and the first volume in what he calls the Learning Series.
Cas and his wife Adry arrived in Paris expecting the postcard version: the Eiffel Tower at golden hour, the Louvre in all its grandeur, croissants that live up to the mythology. What they did not expect was how quickly Paris would dismember that version and replace it with something far more complicated and far more real.
Within hours of arriving at Hôtel Récamier in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, they were walking without a destination. They crossed the Seine on a pedestrian bridge that felt like a boardwalk suspended in the air. A waiter at Le Bonaparte told them, unprompted, that he loved his work. The Seine's reflection caught the evening light. None of it was on any itinerary. All of it stayed.
"Paris does not pause for arrivals," Cas writes in the book's opening line. "It simply continues, and at some point you step into it." That sentence captures something essential about both the city and the man who wrote about it. Cas did not go to Paris to collect experiences. He went to pay attention. And Paris rewarded him for it in ways no guidebook could have predicted.
Learning Paris is not a travel guide in the conventional sense, and Cas is upfront about that. There are no exhaustive restaurant lists, no rigid day-by-day itineraries, no charts of opening hours. What the book offers instead is something harder to find and more lasting: it shows you how to see.
Over six remarkable days, Cas and Adry climb the 424 steps of Notre-Dame's towers and sit quietly on a bench afterward, not saying much, just letting the experience settle. They stand before the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the Musée de Cluny and grapple with the sixth panel, the one that offers no explanation, only mystery. They get beautifully, absurdly lost in the Louvre, to the point where Cas becomes convinced that a Michelin-starred restaurant inside the Eiffel Tower is somehow located on the second floor of the museum. He interrogates multiple attendants. Adry watches with patient amusement.
These are the moments that make the book feel less like reading and more like traveling alongside someone. Cas writes with a self-deprecating humor and a genuine warmth that makes even his wrong turns feel instructive. But beneath the lightness is a man doing something quietly serious: reckoning with what it means to truly encounter a place rather than simply pass through it.
If you have ever stood in front of a famous painting and felt vaguely guilty for not knowing what you were supposed to feel, this book is for you. If you have ever walked through a foreign city and sensed that the real version of the place was just slightly out of reach, this book is for you. If you have ever suspected that the best travel stories come not from the planned moments but from the ones that catch you off guard, this book is absolutely for you.
Cas Wonsowicz spent decades learning the world by moving through it quickly. Then, at a stage of life when most people slow down, he slowed down on purpose, and discovered that the slower you go, the more Paris gives you.
Learning Paris: Discoveries Along the Seine is available now. Pick up a copy and let Cas take you to the city he learned to love one unhurried step at a time.
