Sunday December 17: Paris
A Lot of Walking
We slept OK but not great. I woke up around 3:30 or so. Amy
was awake. I managed to get back to sleep. Amy did not.
After I took a quick shower, we went down and had a buffet
style breakfast.
Then we went on the panoramic tour of Paris. We stopped at
one point, got off the bus, and took some pictures of the
Eiffel Tower.
Unfortunately, we were on the west side of it, so it was mostly back-lit. We
went past the Arc d’Triumph but we didn’t get off the bus.
At the end, we got off the bus for a walking tour. We
visited
Notre Dame,
which has half of it completely covered with scaffolding.
We ended at a small Christmas market. It was next to a church that was
officially Catholic, but which tended very Eastern/Orthodox in style.
I had on my green down “sweater”, which was not enough. I
was slowly freezing. At the market, Amy got some roasted Chestnuts. I
got a
hot chocolate,
which I managed to slosh all over my camera.
We got back to the hotel with about 45-60 minutes before we
needed to go on the Versailles trip. We thought about going to the
McDonalds for lunch,
but that wasn’t our first choice. They had a buffet at the place in the hotel
where we had breakfast, but that was being used by some sort of conference.
They said that the place on the top floor was open for lunch, so after dropping
our stuff in our room, we went up there.
Not surprisingly, it had a pretty good
view of the city.
They didn’t have a buffet, but they thought we could get in and out in the 30
minutes we had remaining. Amy got a shrimp Caesar salad, and I got a French
version of a ham and cheese sandwich. I ordered a lemonade, but what I got was
a Sprite.
We got out at just the right time. Amy went down first, to
tell them that I was coming. I got organized and went down. I was the second to
last person to arrive, and less than a minute after I got there, we left.
We weren’t going to spend too much time outdoors, and it was
warmer than in the morning, so I kept on the green down sweater. That ended up
being just right.
Versailles is the name of the town where the palace is
located. By car, it is about 30 minutes outside Paris. We started out in the
gardens, which probably looked a lot more impressive in the summer. Right now,
there wasn’t much there. Then we went in, which required us putting our phones
and cameras on a little table and going through the metal detector. I set it
off, and felt like a fool when I realized I had forgotten to take my
point-and-shoot camera out of my pocket.
The rooms in Versailles are huge, ornate, and I can’t
imagine living there, although it was certainly different when there was
furniture there and not nearly so many tourists. I found out that there were
two wings, one for the king and one for the queen, and then the famous hall of
mirrors was built to join the two wings.
At the end of the tour, our guide told us that we had about
45 minutes on our own, and that we should be at the bus at a certain time. I
couldn’t find Amy, so I ended up doing some exploring on my own. I figured that
it was better to kill time in the palace than sitting on the bus.
Eventually I left, and I found Amy standing just outside the
exit. I had assumed that Amy was part of the group around the guide, and that
when we got free time, she immediately ran off. I was wrong. Somehow, Amy
managed to lose the group about 3/4 of the way through the main halls. Either
she got ahead of us, thought she was behind, and so went further ahead, or
maybe she fell behind, hurried to catch up, and somehow passed us. She spent
some time wandering around trying to find us. Then she went outside and waited.
When I left, I found her waiting there. We had about 15 minutes before
we needed to be at the bus,
so we went out to the west side and got some
pictures with the setting sun.
Then we went to the bus.
I was joking to Amy as to whether or not we would be the
last people on the bus. I didn’t think so, as we were getting there 5 minutes
before the scheduled time, but just about the time we sat down, we felt the bus
start to move. So it ends up that we *were* the last people to arrive, even
though we were still ahead of the scheduled time.
After we got back to the hotel room, our plan was to hike
down to try to see the Eiffel Tower lit up at night, and then to catch dinner.
This time, I dug out and put on my heavy down jacket. I also wore my hat. I
brought gloves but didn’t use them. This was definitely the right thing to do.
I would have frozen to death with the lighter jacket.
We easily found our way to the Champs Elysees and followed
it to the
Arc de’Triumphe.
Then I took out the map to see how to get from there
to the Eiffel Tower. That was when I realized that I had left the map in the
hotel room. We went a bit further and then asked a gentleman. He looked it up
on his phone, and we found that we needed to take a right at that very
point. We
continued walking until we saw the tower and hit the river. At this point we
had been walking for about an hour and a half, I think.
Along the way, we passed one building that had a lot of
scaffolding around it. To hide the scaffolding, they covered it with a veneer
that made it look like a
giant suitcase or foot locker.
We went along the river, occasionally stopping to take
pictures. We reached a bridge leading to the tower, crossed the river, and got
some more pictures. I was getting a bit concerned about the time, as it was
getting on 9:00, and we still had a long way to go back, and dinner to eat.
Amy wanted to check out a large Christmas Market by the base
of the tower. I was reluctant, but we took a quick down and back.
Then it was time to make our way back to the hotel. We
didn’t have a map, and we only had a vague idea of what direction to go in.
Given the distance, if we were only a little off, we might easily go rather out
of our way, or perhaps miss it completely. We crossed the river and following
the throng up the hill. We stumbled across the plaza we had stopped at in the
morning to
take pictures of the tower.
Unfortunately, that didn’t really help
us know which way to go
I was hoping to find a map posted somewhere, but then Amy
saw some taxis waiting there, and she suggested that we take a taxi back. We
checked, and it would only be about $15 to ride back, so we took the taxi. That
was definitely the right thing to do. Our driver was continuously talking to
someone on his phone as he was driving. We weren’t sure what language he was
speaking, but it seemed to clearly not be French. Maybe it was Arabic?
We got back a bit after 9. It was late for us for dinner,
but it seems like a normal time in Paris. We went to the place we were planning
to go the first night, but which didn’t open until 7. Just to be different,
this time Amy got the duck and I got the lamb. It was again very good.
One oddity at the restaurant was that they had an
upside-down table setting
attached to the ceiling.
This pretty much ends our visit to Paris. Tomorrow morning,
we need to get up early, bring our bags down, get some breakfast, and head out
on the bus. We’ll visit Reims and end up at the boat in the evening.
