Sorry for not being clear pulykamell, her spring break is the week before mine, so I would arrive on Saturday, the 9th and spend Sat night and Sunday with her in Amsterdam before returning with her to France to spend the rest of my trip there until the 18th. I was also chatting in #straightdope and forgot that I hadn’t explained it fully here.
I plan on getting my passport started tomorrow.
Amsterdam? KLM. 
On nwa.com (Northwest Airlines, which KLM seems to redirect to for US people) I saw return flights LAX to AMS for USD 605 (plus taxes, I suspect). I picked days almost at random, and there was an outbound direct flight, but the return stopped TWICE. I’m sure you could do better.
So if you want to skip Toronto, I guess that’s okay.
:: snif ::
Or you could do an ‘open-jaw’ trip: go to Amstardam and come back from Paris. When I went to Europe, I went to Helsinki and came back from London. (On KLM, incidentally; in both directions I changed between transatlantic and local European flights at Schiphol airport near Amsterdam.)
Open-jaw flights are more expensive, I believe, though most online booking sites I’ve seen are now pricing outbound and return flights individually.
Amsterdam and Paris are close enough together that you could just go to and from Amsterdam and take the train to and from Paris. Or vice versa.
True - and IIRC the Air France-KLM includes connecting ‘flights’ which are actually TGVs.
However, Amsterdam to Strasbourg is a lot further…
Unless you are flying tomorrow, 3000 dollars sounds like at least 2000 too many.
Air France-KLM merger…
Not many people sleep on airplanes. On my Detroit to Osaka to Taipei flight 2 weeks ago (19 hours of pain, woo hoo) I didn’t sleep more than an hour. You’ll be just fine getting onto a train, you’ll have that adrenaline rush of landing in a strange new place and going through mild culture shock etc. Where it will hit you is later that day.
Since there is no single factual answer to the OP, let’s try IMHO.
samclem
The best site to look for airfares I´ve found is www.kayak.com, for LAX to CDG (Paris) in March I saw prices on the 700 dollars by British Airways.