Saturday - Paris Day One

For the first time in 8 days we had to get up early, it was tough! Rob drove us to the Rotterdam train station so we could catch our 8:26am Thalys train, a 3 hr highspeed journey to Paris.I must say it was a very easy way to travel between countries in Europe, no problems, well other than the 15 min. delay in Belgium because an animal was blocking the tracks! The train was comfortable, equipped with Wi-Fi and had large windows to enjoy the scenery, though I must admit there really wasn't too much to see. Its amazing how flat Holland and Belgium are!

We arrived a the North metro station in Paris and had to figure out how to metro to our hotel. Lugging our huge bags through the subway stations wasn't fun. Nor was trying to figure out the metro system. Paris is by far the most complicated city to navigate. Both John and I are pretty good at reading maps but this city proved to be quite a challenge. I can't tell you how many unintentional circles we made during the 3 days!

Thankfully we were able to check into our hotel room early. I was pleasantly surprised that our room was so modern and clean. Typically small of course but overall very nice. I wasn't sure what to expect since we were only spending $200/night on the room, cheap for Paris!
The location in the Latin Quarter, was ideal with its centrality. Lots of restaurants, grocery stores and shops only blocks away.

After checking into our room we grabbed a ham&cheese baguette for lunch and made our way to the Notre Dame......
Lots of people out sightseeing on this beautiful Sat afternoon.

After visiting the Notre Dame we had a couple glasses of wine at a restaurant across the street. Sauvignon is one of my favorite wines and conveniently home to France. we also discovered the crepe, a delish French treat. Basically a thin pancake, drizzled with a variety of things from chocolate, nutella, caramel, banana, or just rolled in sugar. Heavenly! How do these French stay so skinny with a dailly afternoon crepe?

We walked around some gardens nearby and then went back to the hotel to rest up for our 7pm bike tour.

The bike tour met at the Eiffel Tower. It was quite a ways from our hotel so we took the metro over. Its impossible to even begin to describe the enormous size of the Tower. I never imagined it to be so HUGE. There was a really long line of poeople waiting to elevator up to the top for views of the city. Luckily we had a bike tour to catch because I am extremely scared of heights.


(unfortunately these are the only daytime photos I have of the tower, we never got back again!)

So glad John booked us a "Fat Tire Bike Tour" it was so much fun!

Our tour guide was great, a total freak, ski dude from Seattle. His favorite phrase was "totally awesome!" which our Australian bike mates didn't get, but overall he was really informative and had us laughing a lot. He also did a wonderful job keeping us safe as Paris isn't the most biker friendly city.

We made our way around the whole city, hitting most of the hotspots and getting lots of stories.

One of my favorite stops was for ice cream, white chocolate, yum! here's a photo of our parked bikes while everyone is eating. cool old school bikes.

My most favorite stop was the Louvre, the sun had just set and the lights all came on as we biked through. There was someone playing the saxophone and the atmosphere was magical.

(this is the bridge heading into the Louvre. a popular hang out for the locals to watch the sunset and picnic with their wine and bread and cheese. this was just one of the many large groups we had to manuveur around. i was taking this photo while biking, hence the blur, sorry! it was such a cool sight though I really wanted to capture it, hard to imagine here in the States)

Look at the clouds in the sky it was surreal.

We ended the tour with an hour boat ride down the Seine. It was pretty chilly by that point, so luckily our tour guide had lots of French wine to warm us up : ) From the boat we were able to get a better view of the Eiffel Tour and Notre Dame and many other sites.

our attempt at getting a photo of the two of us on the boat! obvioulsy we had too much wine by this point. doesn't john have a nice chin : ) oops!