We had originally planned to fly into Paris from Edinburgh and and go straight to Mont Saint-Michel, but daughter Amanda wanted to meet up with us and had never been to Paris before. We met Amanda and her fiancé Greg at the airport and piled into a cab for the trip to Hotel da Vinci where we had stayed previously. It's a good location, just 1-1/2 blocks from the Louvre on the Left Bank in Saint Germain.
We decided to take a walk that evening and found ourselves at the Eiffel Tower. The line wasn't horribly long, so we bought tickets and rode the elevator to the top. It offers a great view of Paris, I especially like looking out across the river and the Trocadero. We were back on the ground and right under the tower when the sparkly light show started so we managed to get some good photos of that.
We got up early the next day and walked to Notre Dame only to find out that the towers are now accessed by advance ticket only, and we couldn't get in until 4pm that day. While Mike and I were figuring out the ticket situation, A and G went inside to tour the cathedral. We decided to walk down to the Louvre as it was still early in the day and bought a museum pass there to get discounts on the places we wanted to go. The Louvre is huge and confusing and filled with so many works of art, see my blog post from 2016 to learn more. Amanda was an Art History major in college, so she loves museums and of course she wanted to see the Mona Lisa.
From there, we found a place to have a bite to eat and went back to Notre Dame for our timed entrance to the towers. It's a long spiral walk up and when we made it to the first open area, Amanda decided she didn't need to go all the way to the top. She and Mike headed back down the stairs while Greg and I kept going to the top level. After looking out across Paris from this vantage point, Greg and I made our way down to find Mike and Amanda enjoying a nice cold ice cream cone! Aha! Could this be the real reason they left us? It was a pretty hot day so we really couldn't blame them. Luckily Mike offered to buy one for me too, so all was well.
The next day, we went to the Musee d'Orsay which both Amanda and Greg enjoyed. It is not anywhere as big as the Louvre but it's less crowded and you don't get hopelessly lost inside. Amanda likes the Impressionists so she got to visit her friends Monet, Von Gogh, etc.
We walked down to the Arc de Triumph and climbed to the top of that as well. Luckily our museum passes allowed to skip the big line outside. It was blazing hot at the top and not much better inside, but I do like watching all the crazy traffic down below and all the crazier pedestrians that don't know about the access tunnels. They try running across that huge roundabout and dodging traffic as they go. Yikes!
We had dinner that night at the Paris Hard Rock Cafe. Greg collects T-shirts from all the Hard Rocks he's visited and so he needed one from Paris. Later that evening, we took boat ride on the Seine to see some of Paris' landmarks lit up.
Just a whirlwind introduction to Paris for the kids, but we had to be at Mont Saint-Michel the next day.
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