Holiday: Day 3 - Paris
I know that sometimes I can be a little on the cheap side, but it has its pros and cons. Well today was one of the cons as I’d booked a 7am Eurostar from London to Paris which meant another ridiculously early start and a quick trip in a taxi to London St Pancras Station.
The taxi, or are that cabs? Well whatever they are it was the first time I had ever been in one. I’m not really sure what I was expecting but I think. that I thought they would be old and clunky, but they aren’t. In fact the one that we caught seemed to be extremely new and was unbelievably quiet inside. Having never been in one before I was also surprised that you can fit a family of four plus all their luggage and still have space. Why don’t we do taxi’s like this in Australia?
I’m not sure what the process was to go to France from the UK via train pre Brexit, but for us it meant full bag screening, COVID certificates and passport control. Anyhow, given that we got to the station quite early to allow for this process it meant we had plenty of time to sit around, because its not like you can board the train early and wait, I guess that gave me time for a coffee..
Being a bit of a train nerd I was looking forward to the Eurostar and I’d definitely say it didn’t disappoint. I liked that we were seated in a group of four with a small table between us, the seating was pretty generous compared to a plane and we had power plugs, so the kids could go nuts on their devices. The only issue was the wifi was somewhat intermittent, but that’s just a luxury right.
The total journey time was around 3 hours I think which is very doable, it also means that you arrive in the centre of Paris itself and you have your bags with you already. For us it meant that we had to navigate Gare du Nord during peak hour, find a ticket booth and then connect via the metro to our hotel.
One thing I like about travelling is learning all the slightly different ways countries solve the same problem, so where in London I could just tap on and off with my credit card, in Paris we bought tickets that you insert each time, you also don’t tap off you just go through the gate at the end.
After we made the trip to the hotel it was time to set off and do some sight seeing as we couldn’t yet check in. When we left home we were excited that we’d be leaving the colder weather and the rain behind, what we didn’t anticipate is that we’d arrive to 40 degree heat. It meant we spent a lot of time in the sun, but interestingly for some reason you don’t get burnt like you do in Australia, I don’t really know why but I guess that helps explain why you always see those bright red brits walking around Bondi, haven’t got used to the sun yet.
First thing we went and saw was of course the Eiffel Tower which never stops being impressive, although I think I’d forgotten just how tall it was. Queues to go up were massive and there was just an insane amount of people around so we decided to continue wandering around the streets, I also needed to find myself a hat so we decided to wander towards the Champs Élysées.
Toasted baguette with beef and fries
Along the way we stopped to grab a bite to eat, no M&S here but it did mean we got to sample our first baguettes of the trip. I decided to try something a little different to normal and got steak and chips on a toasted baguette, and can I say it was amazing!! Why don’t we do food like this? One thing I really like is visiting different little bakeries, some are great, some not so good. The one thing I’m not really convinced about is how they make their coffee, which is pretty inconsistent. Maybe here it’s all about the pastry with the coffee on the side rather than going for a coffee and having a pastry on the side…
Arc de Triopmphe, note this is not my hat :)
We finally made it to the Champs Élysées which was part being prepared for the Bastille Day Parade and part getting ready for the Tour de France. We walked all the way up one side to the Arc de Triomphe, which is probably one of my favourite landmarks in the city, and then made our way back down the other side. Luckily we stopped off at La Coste and I finally got myself a hat, my bald head now had some form of protection :)
We continued all the way to the end where it turns into Place de la Concorde where we found our way back into the metro and back to our hotel so we could finally get checked in. A quick turn around and we were back out the door, we were going to commit to going up the Eiffel Tower given that many sights were going to be closed or busy during Bastille Day the next day.
Surprisingly, or maybe not surprising given it was 7pm when we got there the queue wasn’t too bad, we did the obligatory bag checking and probably only had to queue for about 15 minutes before we got our tickets, and for us it was immediately onto an elevator to start the process of getting to the top. First lift was nice and quick, but we had a wait of around 20 minutes to catch the second lift to the top, which in the scheme of things isn’t too long I guess. Anyhow we got to the top, hooray us :) We probably couldn’t have asked for better weather and time of the day to have reached the top and we were lucky to have gotten there without too much fuss or effort.
All good things come to an end, so for us it was back down the tower where we decided to walk along the river and look for a bit of food and then made our way back to our hotel for the night., still getting used to this whole extended daylight thing where it’s still bright up until 10:30pm.
Michael