A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of life

It was Thomas Jefferson, who lived in Paris from 1784 to 1789, who said:

A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of life

and 240 years later, I think he had it just right. But before describing our day in Paris, let's go back to the beginning of the day.

Morning

I woke up at 4.10am and was glad to see that apart from a black eye and a few scraps on my hands I'm still feeling great. The small cut on my eyebrow that did all the bleeding last night isn't visible with my lovely shiner. I use the time before Drew wakes up to complete the Riga to Tallinn blog post.

Drew wakes at 6am and I make a cup of tea for us both and do our ablutions. 

Breakfast

We go down to breakfast at 7.30am. I was right in my guess yesterday, there is no sign of herring in the Paris breakfast offer.

The selection of cheese, light fluffy omelette and cooked meats make up for the missing herring, though I am going to miss that sharp tang.

Optician

While I'm feeling well my glasses didn't come off so lightly, one of the arms is so out of kilter that the glasses sit at a strange angle. I spot that there is an Optician nearby, the Saint Martin Optical Centre. The person who serves me does a great job of straightening my glasses, they aren't perfect, but they are wearable, which is good as my spare pair are at home.

Paris Metro 

After having no problem with apps in any of the many and varied places we have visited, it is the Paris Metro app that only works with France registered phones, which defeats me. It is set up so that your metro travel is billed to the phone account. So, while I still buy a day ticket, it is a card one bought at one of the machines in Gare du Nord for €8.45 each.

As well as using a machine and having a card, you need to write on it to validate it. At home I always carry a pen but I've dropped out of this practice during this holiday as I was finding it hard to take my phone in and out of my pocket with my pen in the way. So, if you look back at the photos, you'll see I stopped carrying it from Vilnius onwards. Pity, as today it would have helped. Still, we managed to borrow one from the customer service assistant at the station and write on our names and the date.

Norte Dame

I'd not planned any details of the trip to Paris, other than booking a restaurant for a meal tonight. In a way I saw Paris as a relaxing day at the end of the holiday. Indeed, the original plan was to go from Hamburg to Amsterdam and catch the Eurostar from there, but Amsterdam is hosting the Formula One Grand Prix, so had no accommodation available, hence us ending the trip here.  

Though as we are in Paris, 11 years since we were last here, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss visiting some of the traditional sites. And given the events of 2019 it was at Notre Dame that we started.

Notre Dame had made such a big impact on me in previous visits to Paris, now it is a building site, but with lots of evidence of its renewal. The images around the building use photos from a National Geographic report on the reconstruction, so it seems best to link direct to that article.

Eiffel Tower

We walk from Notre Dame to the College De France 

where we pick up the Bus 86 which goes from here to Rapp-La Bourdonnais.

We arrive at the Eiffel Tower just before midday and decide that we are perfectly happy viewing from the bottom, having previously visited the top (well I did, Drew doesn't like heights!) [Co-pilot's note: It is not the heights that bother me, dear readers, it is the sudden stop at the bottom of the drop!!]

We walk down to the River Seine 

and walk along the bank until we come to the Olympic clock, which is counting down to July next year or 336 days.

Place de La Concorde

We left the tower area and caught the Bus 42 to Place de La Concorde at the end of the Champs-Elysées.

The 3,300 year-old Luxor Obelisk is always very impressive, but the two amazing fountains, the Fontaines des Mers et des Fleuves are closed for renovations.

From the Obelisk we walked down the Champs-Elysées to its junction with Avenue Winston Churchill where the Grand and Petit Palais are located. 

Like the tourists we are we took photos of Clemenceau, De Gaulle and Churchill, all who have statues in this area.

Musée de l’Armée

We continued our walk interested in the large dome we could see the other side of the Seine.

It turns out this is the Musée de l’Armée which is a location of the Tomb of the Emperor Napoleon. Perhaps it planned to give us an excuse for another visit to Paris, as the site is being renovated and won't open until just before the Olympics next year. Still, it is a very imposing building.

Sacré Coeur

We catch the Bus 92 and then the Metro 13 to Place de Clichy from which we change to Metro 2 to Anvers and then up the Funicular to Montmartre.

Sacré Coeur is as busy as always, but is such a prayerful place, even with the crowds all around.

Back to the Hotel 

We leave Montmartre and walk down the back of the hill, rather than the way we came up.

We catch the Metro 12 from Lamark, it is a very old station and, when we get to the bottom of the steps, we are warned there are 112 of them - I guess they were easier to walk down than they would have been up, but it would have been nice to know at the top. 

We change at Market Possineures and catch Metro 4 to Gard L'Est, arriving at the hotel at 3.30pm. It does make a good impression from this angle, which I'd not noticed on the day we arrived.

Afternoon

I snoozed for an hours after our walk in the heat of Paris. I complete another blog post and from 6pm onwards we shower and dress for dinner.

We headed out of the hotel at 7pm for our dinner at Esens'all, but more about that in the next post.