We met Ricky at 6:30 Friday morning, took a taxi to the train station, took a train to London, and then got on the Eurostar. That was exciting and a little scary at the same time! The Eurostar is a train that goes 185 miles per hour. It goes through the chunnel – meaning that it goes UNDER THE OCEAN for 20 minutes!!!!!!!!!!!! Yikes that is just crazy! I was actually a little nervous about it before, but no one knew that except for Phillip! Haha!!! It was totally fine though…couldn’t even tell anything except that you were in a tunnel because it was dark! Neat experience and I’m glad we did it!
When we arrived, we bought city train/subway tickets and managed to find our way to our hotel. We dropped off our luggage, which was great! We took a small (carry on size) rolly bag and one bigger backpack this time. The bigger backpack was mainly full of food – tons of fruit for me and snacks for both of us. I took 8 pieces of fruit along – I was afraid I wouldn’t get enough veggies/fruits with eating out a lot. I was glad to have the fruit!!!! We ended up eating most of our snacks too, so the backpack was emptier on the way home and we had room for a few souvenirs we bought – thimbles and shot glasses of course! We did have 2 very small starter backpacks packed in our other bags and each wore one of those all the time. That way we could keep camera, camcorder, wallet, and snacks with us, but they weren’t as heavy as our big laptop backpacks are! We discovered on the Amsterdam trip that a big backpack is just toooooo much for me to lug around for lots of walking these days! I felt bad that Phillip had to deal with the backpack and the rolly bag, but he kept telling me it was fine! He’s so sweet!!!
Ok, anyway, the hotel was interesting. We booked a room for 3 people. The picture online showed 3 single beds all in a row with a few feet between each bed. In reality, the room had 2 single beds pushed together as a big bed and one bed (a little smaller!) over by the bathroom. There was very little walking space in the room!!! Crowded for 3 people, but all we did was sleep and shower there anyway, so it was fine!!!
We walked the 10 or so minutes back to the train station and took a train to the Eiffel Tower! Amazing!!! It was so big! We waited in line FOREVER!!! I didn’t time it, but I’m guessing 2 hours?? We finally got to take an elevator to the 2nd level, which was about halfway up. The very top was “closed for congestion.” We thought about trying to come back another time, but the views were awesome from the 2nd level so we all decided we were fine with that!
We finally saw a McDonalds and were all starving, so stopped for food! We were fascinated that McDonalds has 2 sections to order from – the normal and another off to the side called “McCafe.” The Café part had lots of yummy French pastries!!!! Then we walked around the city for awhile and found the Arc de Triomphe. Neat! Then we went back to see the Eiffel Tower as it was getting dark. Just before 9:00, the lights on the Eiffel Tower came on. At 9:00 exactly, other twinkling lights came on for 5 minutes. They were soooo pretty! We just wish they would have kept them on longer! We enjoyed taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower after dark. It’s amazing! It was definitely my favorite part of the trip!
On Saturday, we took a train to Normandy. It was a 2.5 hour train ride! When we got there, we saw a hotel sign across the street that said English tours. We went to check it out and we were really lucky!!! A group that had booked the tour hadn’t shown up so we were able to go instead of them!!!! (If we had taken a normal taxi tour, it wouldn’t have been in English!) So we got really lucky and our guide was able to show us and tell us about everything. Even luckier in my opinion – the hotel bar/restaurant made us huge French bread sandwiches for lunch that we could take with us in the van! (I am always starving these days, so missing a meal is just not cool!)
We went to the D-Day Museum, where we looked around and watched a couple of short films explaining everything. We stopped at several German gun batteries – bunkers in the hill that they used for protection while firing cannons. We went to the American Cemetery. There is a cross to represent each fallen soldier. We found several from Indiana. The cemetery was peaceful, beautiful, and very moving. We stopped at Omaha Beach and got to go down to the water and put our hands in – COLD! I was excited to be at the ocean again though! We went to Point du Hoc , which had lots of bunkers (small concrete buildings built into hills for protection, with cannons in the buildings) and huge holes in the ground from where the bombs hit! It is just incredible to think about – sad and scary! Phillip really enjoyed our Normandy tour and kept thinking how much Papa would have loved to be there with us!!! I really enjoyed it too – and learned a lot! Normandy was very pretty and the people there were all so nice! It was a neat little place. There were canola fields everywhere – bright yellow, so beautiful!
Sunday morning, Phillip and I planned to go to Notre Dame Cathedral for Easter Mass! We planned for half an hour to get there and wanted to be about half an hour early. So we set our alarms accordingly. I woke up 7 minutes before the alarm went off (so I thought!!!) and went ahead and got up, turned off the alarms, and got in the shower. I got Phillip up after my shower. We were ready right on time and headed out of the hotel to walk to the train station. When we got to the lobby, I realized we were AN HOUR EARLY!!!!!! I must have looked at my cell phone wrong…I got up an hour and 7 minutes early! Oh geez!!! We weren’t thrilled, but joked that maybe we were meant to get up early for some reason…YEP!!! We wouldn’t have made it to church if we had left at the right time!!!! We had to wait for trains and then the train route that we were on let us off at a different spot than where we thought and we still had a long walk there!!! We would have missed church! God was looking out for us again, I do believe! Anyway, we did have about 20 minutes extra, so went into a couple of souvenir shops before joining the madness – the crowd of people in front of Notre Dame was just insane!!! We couldn’t even really tell where the line was or if there was a line! We were just hoping to get inside!!! We did, but of course, we didn’t have a seat! We were off to the right side and couldn’t even see the Alter, but they had TV screens up to watch Mass, so it was fine. We did at least have a railing to lean on. I only lasted about 10 minutes of that before I sat on the floor in front of the railing!!! Phillip ended up standing the whole time! We couldn’t understand a thing since Mass was in French, but we did get a Bulletin that had the readings written in English at least! After mass, we were able to walk to the front of church for some pictures. Amazing experience!!!
We met Ricky outside after Mass and ate lunch at a little local café. It was an outdoor restaurant with tables by the street so we could watch the crowds! Fun! Then we headed to the Louvre!!! The Louvre is a huge art museum…full of paintings and sculptures. Huge doesn’t even begin to do this place justice honestly. It had 4 floors and each one just went on forever!!!! We managed to see most of it in the 3.5 hours we were there, but we were walking fast and only quickly glanced at most things because that’s all we had time for! Our favorite was seeing the Mona Lisa!!!! That was neat! :-)
It was 6:00 when the Louvre closed and not much else was open on Easter night, so we decided to go enjoy dinner at the Hard Rock Café. We were all so ready to sit down and relax. The Louvre wore us all out, especially me!!! I admit I had to sit and rest a few times in the Louvre!!! That place was huge!!! We enjoyed Hard Rock Café! The free refills were wonderful and unexpected!!!! (Places around here just don’t have free refills. You pay 3-5 Pounds/Euros for a soda or water and then you just get one!) So we were pleasantly surprised about the refills. I got a veggie sandwich with Portobello mushroom, squash, zucchini, tomato, pepper, and onions…delicious! We even had a coupon for free chocolate sundaes after the meal…they were sooooooo good!!!! After dinner, we walked to see the Moulin Rouge! Very interesting area, but neat to see! Then we walked back to see the Eiffel Tower once more! We got there just in time to see the 9:00 sparkling lights! Then we sat in the grass in a huge field (with hundreds of other people) just enjoying the view of the Eiffel Tower! Good memories!
Monday morning, we slept in a little later, which was wonderful! We checked out of our hotel and caught a train to Napoleon’s Gravesite. It’s a war museum and a huge beautiful building with sculptures and amazing caskets. Fascinating! We walked around a little more, enjoying the sights of Paris and had lunch at Quick - a neat local chain sort of like McDonalds, but with lots of different choices! It was really good! We were kind of proud of ourselves for figuring out the menu (which was only in French) and managing to order what we wanted! Ha! We also stopped at a bakery for pastries on Monday…have to do that while in France!!! Ricky and I got pastries that were filled with chocolate cream. Phillip got a flaky pastry with chocolate chips. They were so good! Then we began the journey back to the train station and boarded the Eurostar for home.
Overall, we really did have a great trip! We enjoyed our experience completely and are so glad we went! However, none of us want to go back!!!! Paris was dirty and smelled like a sewer. The people were NOT friendly. It was so crowded! The subway was harder to figure out than London’s subway. Just overall more stressful of a place I believe. But certainly a good experience and I wouldn’t trade it! We had a blast! (Oh – we bought the cutest little onesie in Paris!!!! We even got a little stuffed animal character of the Eiffel Tower…so cute!)
Looks like it was so much fun--thanks for sharing! The onesie is cute :)
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