July 3 – Oui Oui Paris until Zut Alors! Paris

Today started off very early as we had to be at the Lille, France train station at 6:30 am for a high speed train ride to Paris for the day. When they say high speed they mean it…at one point this morning we reach 302 km/h. It was odd see us pass the vehicles on the road who were probably going between 100-120 km/h crawling by as we zipped by.

When we got here, we purchased a day pass for the Paris transit system which allowed us to hop on and off all the trains, subways, etc we needed for the day. This I am sure had saved us many kilometres of walking and was so easy to use.

As we got in to Paris pretty early, our first stop was the Eiffel Tower. Ever since we decided to make a day trip down here we were pretty adamant that we were not going to spend the money to go up to the top of the tower. We (who are we kidding…it was all Esther) decided we had to do it. So we quickly got in the line to buy tickets and were able to pretty much head right up with no wait. It was amazing! The views were well worth the cost. There were at least 2 proposals while we were there which was cute to see.

After the Eiffel Tower, Patrick found a burger place called Birdy. Headed there to have a great lunch. Nothing like having a burger as a nice french lunch 🙂

Hoping on the bus we headed towards Notre Dame and Louvre. These are two were definitely a look from the outside visit. The people waiting in lines to get in both of these were absolutely crazy.

Another couple buses (ended up going on the wrong one to start) took us to the Arc de Triomphe.

We still had some time to kill so we hopped back on a bus to visit the filming locations for the show Emily in Paris. We were able to find the apartment and restaurant used in the filming then were able to stumble upon the Pantheon. The architecture in Paris is unreal.

This is where we get to the zut ahlors! part of the day. We hoped back on the bus to take us back to the Eiffel Tower to wait for the time we had to head back to the Gare du Nord. Patrick had his phone out as we were waiting for bus to start and was using a local wifi signal. After we got off the bus, he realized that the phone was still on the bus. He tried to catch it but it drove off with his phone still on the seat. We have filed all reports we can to get it back but really have no hope of it being found. Fingers crossed we have to make another trip down this way.

Got back to the high speed train to head back to Lille…and then it got delayed due to there being a small bag being left on one of the cars further down from us. That car plus another had to be evacuated while they waited for the police to show up. False alarm and only 30 minutes delayed. This day has been interesting :-S

Total steps today, with all the transit, 24,116.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day to explore up near Ypres, Belgium and Vimy, France.