A Quickie About Paris

One would think with the girls gone all day and having basically 6 hours by myself I should have plenty of time to blog about our experiences.  That is just not the case.  Typically, I find myself rushing around the last hour hoping that I make it to school on time!  Anyway...Paris day by day:

Thursday-travel day:
Our plane was due to leave the airport at 8:55PM.  I had been checking the flight status all day and every flight to Paris before ours had gotten cancelled.  But when it was time to leave, our flight was still on schedule.  To shorten the story, we ended up having to wait until almost 1AM before our flight departed the terminal.  We arrived at our hotel (the Hilton Arc de Triomphe) at 3:30AM and crawled into our beds.  On a side note, we chose the Hilton because it was one of the few hotels in Paris that had enough beds for the 4 of us in one room.  That's pretty typical of Europe from what I've seen.

Friday-tour day:
Luckily, I was smart enough to not book our private tour until 1PM.  So we got to sleep in a bit; until about 10:30.  Once we were up and cleaned up, we walked across the street to a little cafe called "Le Parthenon."  The food was very good and the coffee even better!  The girls both got "chocolate soup" aka hot chocolate.  We headed back to our hotel to meet our tour guide-Pizza...that was his name for real!  He was very nice and very knowledgeable.  He took us to see the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the fashion district, two of the opera houses, the Champs Elysees,  Montemarte and St. Peter's, the Louvre, Notre Dame, and some other little known out of the way places.  It was a very cold and windy day, so we were quite happy to spend most of our time riding around in a minivan.  Kaylee fell asleep toward the end of the tour and she was snoring in the back seat :o) 

Saturday-Louvre day:
We woke up Saturday morning to snow.  What a perfect day to spend inside!  We took a taxi to the Louvre and got some brunch in the Louvre cafeteria and spent our day looking at all the beautiful sculptures, paintings, and artifacts.  I think we could have spent three days there and still have not seen everything.  I believe all the sculptures were my favorite.  Around dinner time we left the Louvre and walked along the neighboring streets looking for someplace to eat.  We came across a little bar that was very cozy and had a very nice dinner. 

Sunday-Eiffel Tower/Champs Elysees Christmas Market
Wow!  The beggars around the Eiffel Tower were very persistent along with the african men selling their little trinkets.  It's illegal for them to sell those things on the street and we saw them running from the police several times this day.  We waited in our long, freezing cold line to take the lift up the Eiffel Tower.  It's definitely a fun trip!  We took the lift all the way to the top as well, but didn't stay up there very long due to the cold, windy, wet conditions.  We ate lunch at 58, the restaurant on the first level of the Eiffel Tower.  Which besides the Louvre, I would say was my favorite part of the trip.  After lunch, we walked to the Champs where they were having their Christmas Market. They had tons of little white huts selling gifts and foods.  We stopped to get some Vin Chaud (hot cinnamon wine) and continued our walk up the market to the Roue de Paris.  We got our tickets and had our ride on the giant ferris wheel.  It was nice to be out of the wind for a while.  We walked back up the Champs Christmas market and bought the girls new hats and gloves at one of the little shops.   Then we found a little italian restaurant and stopped for some pizza and the best tiramisu I've ever had!

Monday-Last day
Our flight wasn't due to leave until afterr 6PM so we decided to go take a Seine river cruise.  We got a different perspective of the city and it was very nice to sit and relax.  We stopped at another little cafe near the opera for lunch and made it back to the hotel just in time to grab another taxi to the airport.

Paris was great...cold, but great.  It was a very nice family trip but we were all very happy to get back to our sunny, sixty degree, Barcelona weather.