Paris, day eleven…..
Last full day in Paris is almost over. And if you havne’t noticed a trend so far, things didn’t quite go as planned. I overslept a bit, since I was awaken around 4am by someone yelling in the street. He was at it for nearly an hour and it took me a while to get back sleep again. No clue what is was, I am guessing it was workmen doing something, since he wasn’t so much screaming, but yelling at people todo things.
So late start meant I missed breakfast in the hotel. This has been the safest place for me to eat by far in Paris. I tried a couple bites of a almond croissant Rosie brought back and just had my tea. We finally hit the street close to noon and headed towards the Eiffel Tower. It is a nice long walk from our hotel, close to an hour according to Google Maps. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but walking with Isaac and Rosie is a little difficult for me. They are both MUCH, MUCH slower than I. Which means I am either having to stop all the time to wait for them, or running into the back of them. So I suspect the walk would have taken longer than the estimated 60 minutes.
We took off towards the Tuileries Gardens and then hung a right onto the Champs Elysé. This was one of the planned places to visit, which I had figured wasn’t going to happen. But it was basically on our way and mostly in the right direction. Again, it was one of those situations where you could tell it was really pretty in the spring/summer, but today it was blah.
Champs Elysé
As you can see, the sky was pretty grey and it had just started switching from the misting to raining phase at this point. As we kept going, it switched from raining to dumping serious water on us, which was made worst by the wind starting to blow it sidewise. At this point, Rosie declared we had got close enough and were were heading back to the hotel.
This was the best view of the Eiffel Tower I got….
Eiffel Tower, sort of
At his point, we ducked into the closest Metro station to get out of the rain and figure out what todo. Initially Rosie was thinking of Uber, but we eventually just figured out the Metro system. The underground train system in Paris is called the Metro and it appears pretty decent. We hadn’t bothered using it all week, since most everything was closest enough to walk to that we wanted to see. (And we had gotten seriously lazy)
In London I had downloaded an app for my phone which would take the beginning and ending points and tell you which trains to use. I hadn’t planned on using the Metro in Paris, so I never looked for a similar app. But between GoogleMaps and Rosie decoding the signs, we figure out how to get back to our hotel.
Metro station in Paris
I was really hoping that once it stopped raining and we dried out, we’d make another trip on the Metro to see the Eiffel Tower, but it didn’t happen. Rosie and I ended up taking naps, while Isaac watched tv shows on his iPad. We finally got moving around 7pm and walked across the street to have noodles.Tomorrow we fly out in the morning back to the States. Since the trip home is naturally longer, I decided to add a layover in Dallas. We are on the plane from Paris to DFW about the same amount of time as the flight from Seattle to London, but need another three hours to make it the rest of the way home. I figured a 2.5 hour layover to get off the plane, stretch and move around was a good plan. It means we won’t get home until nearly 8PM on Friday, but I think it was a smart move.