Paris, Part Un

In October, we spent a glorious 11 days on vacation in France. First, we paid a visit to the beautiful City of Lights, Paris. From there, we went to Normandy to see some D-Day sites. Paris had been on my destination list for a long time. In fact, I thought I was probably the only airline employee who hadn't been there! But, Joe had been there and he didn't really like it that well back in 1985. I'm glad to say that this time, he enjoyed it a lot more.

Here are some excerpts from my travel journal and a few pictures. I decided to break it up a bit, since we were gone for so long!!

Friday, October 16, 2009 – Bon Jour!

We opted to route through London on our way to Paris in order to fly premium class. I mean, it is an overnight flight AND a long one!!! We landed on Friday morning and caught an Air France flight in to Paris. For the record, we saw 2 things of interest while at LHR – two A380s (a Singapore Airlines plane and a Qantas plane) and the paint job on the Virgin Atlantic planes (BA/AA – No WAY!!).

This trip would not turn out to be without challenges. First up was that upon arrival into Paris we realized that we need to brush up on our communication skills - with each other. As we walked up to the ATM machine to get cash (always one of our first stops on an international trip) we realized that we didn't have an ATM card. I thought Joe had said he was taking his, so I took mine out of my wallet. So, here we are in Paris with no cash and no ATM card. Fortunately (and luckily), Joe had brought his original Citibank credit card and he knew the PIN number. With that, we were able to get a cash advance. Whew!!!

Once we got past the cash drama, we decided to follow the advice of Rick Steves’ and take the Roissy bus to the Opera House and the Metro to our hotel area. We attempted to buy tickets for the bus at the machine, but it didn’t seem to work (we found this problem later in the trip when trying to use our credit card in ticket machines). We inserted our credit card (twice) and then it kept telling us to insert cash. But a receipt of some sort was in the dispenser, so we thought it worked. On the bus, we showed it to the bus driver who shook his head but he didn’t speak English and we don’t speak French, so he ended up just waving us on. (And they say the French aren’t friendly!!!) Turns out it didn't charge our credit card, so we got the ride into town for free.

Finding our hotel, Hotel Muguet in the Rue Cler area, was fairly simple with the help of a map we purchased at Barnes & Noble that had the hotel on it. We were pleasantly surprised by the size of the room. Usually rooms in Europe are so small you can barely turn around, but this one is quite large with a king size bed and a full bath. There are even 2 closets, so we decided to unpack instead of living out of our suitcases.

It was about 5:30 PM, so instead of going straight to bed (which was tempting), we decided to walk around a little. You can actually see the top of the Eiffel Tower from our room, so we headed that way. It is really beautiful at night because they light it up. They even make it “sparkle” for a few minutes at the top of each hour. It is HUGE, too, much bigger than I imagined for some reason.

From our hotel room:


BEAUTIFUL:


Saturday, October 17, 2009 – the Louvre and Arc de Triomphe

Today we decided to start with 2 of the Paris Big 5 (as identified by Joe – Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and Versailles). After finding a café for breakfast where we paid $45 for hot chocolate and yogurt parfaits with runny, icky yogurt but tasty granola, we headed to the Metro and got off at the Louvre where we toured only 1 of the 3 wings – the Denon Wing. First we saw Venus de Milo and just let me say, she really doesn’t look hundreds of years old. From there, we saw Winged Victory of Samothrance, the French Crown Jewels (very unimpressive, especially since I have seen the British Crown Jewels) and the Mona Lisa to name a few. Mona Lisa is small and I guess a lot of people are disappointed by that, but I really wasn’t. I thought she looked just like the pictures and I thought it was pretty darn cool to see her. Because someone tried to take a knife to her a few years ago, she is behind glass and you can’t get too close.

Venus de Milo:

Winged Victory of Samothrance:

French Crown Jewels:

Me and Mona:

From the Louvre, we hopped the Metro down to the Arc de Triomphe. After exiting the Metro, you have to find the sidewalk on the Champs-Elysees that leads underground to the Arc, which is in the middle of a roundabout. The Arc was commissioned by Napoleon after the Battle of Austerlitz. It is huge and very impressive. We opted to use our Museum Pass to climb the stairs to the top where we had our first of three views over Paris.



Views from the top:


A stroll down the Champs-Elysees would be pretty much the end of our day and this pretty much ends my recap of Paris, Part One.