Friday, July 22: PARIS!

Wow, the weekend in Paris passed in a whirlwind, but I'll try to catch up! We left early and drove to Paris with my Dad. My Dad had added me as a driver to his insurance (but not Daryl, since he did not have his birth date with him), so I actually drove the second half! Yes, that means I drove into Paris all the way to the hotel! It was not too bad at all, quite a ways outside of the city in the La Defense area. We arrived at the hotel around 1 pm and got going right away to see the city. After some hassle with the ticket machine, we did buy Metro tickets and went to the Montmartre district first.

on the metro

We walked up to the beautiful Sacre Coeur basilica with its sweeping views of the city. Unfortunately it started to rain, but we took shelter inside the church, which was beautiful to walk through.They were trying the prevent tourists from taking any photos, but I thought it was just flash photos that were prohibited until the very end when a guy actually put his hand right in front of my Dad's lens and said no photos. Well by then we had a lot of good ones :-)

We also got the first good view of the Eiffel tower from the distance.

When the rain let up, we took the metro down to the Seine river and since it was still sprinkling on and off, we decided to take a boat trip to see the sights from the river, sheltered from the rain. It was a great boat tour, we saw everything and as you can see, the weather cleared up nicely!

Hello France!

After the boat trip we walked to Notre Dame cathedral. The evening sun was just at the perfect angle, giving us stunning photo opportunities! Alex enjoyed feeding the friendly pigeons from his hands!

the famous gargoyles

Then we had supper at a nice Thai restaurant and went home to the hotel. It was about a 20 minute walk form the metro station back to our hotel, but the kids were real troopers, getting home after 11 pm.

 It was a long day, lots of walking, but a wonderful experience!