Paris Update

I just realized that I did not post many comments on our trip to Paris, so here is a summary of the trip.


We left Morges on a Thursday morning and took the local train to Lausanne. We took the TGV from Lausanne to Paris. It takes a little less than four hours to get from Lausanne to Paris. I purchased the tickets on line and thought we are all sitting together, but it turns out that we were not. We got lucky that the train wasn't super crowded and we were able to sit together.

Our apartment was less than a 10 minute taxi ride from Gare Lyon. We were on the 3rd floor (4th US floor) and the stairway was narrow. It sort of a pain to get the stroller up and down, but it was worth it since staying in an apartment is much easier than an apartment. We spent the afternoon wondering around the neighborhood, but didn't actually do any serious sight seeing. Much to our surprise, the kids both slept as well as they did it home, which was a big improvement from the trip to Interlaken.


On Friday morning we got up and went to the Louvre. The security line was fairly long, but since we had a stroller we got to the front of the line to get hand checked. There are actually four ticket lines inside, so it didn't take long. The first thing we did was see the Mona Lisa. There weren't too many people there, so we got a decent view. The kids decided that they were hungry, so we went to the ticket area and had a snack. Then we went and wandered a bit and saw Venus De Milo. Then we left. All told we were in the Louvre for maybe 2.5 hours.

After the Louvre we walked to the Luxembourg gardens for lunch. Rowen enjoyed playing at the playground (2 Euros to play) and Niamh had fun pushing the stroller around. After that we walked to the Eiffel Tower. It was a fairly long walk, but not too bad. We didn't go up because the lines were too long.

On Saturday we went to Notre Dame early to beat the crowds. We didn't have to wait to get in and walk around, but the line to the museum and the spire walk already had a huge line an hour before it officially opened. We spent the afternoon walking around in search of chocolate shops that Emily wanted to visit. Unfortunately, most of the ones we found were closed for August. We ended up finding a few, so the quest was successful.

On Sunday we had to be out of the apartment by 9:30 and we took a cab to the train station. We found lockers for our stuff and then took the metro in search of another chocolate shop. We found it, but it was closed for the day even though the web site indicated it was open on Sunday. We walked back toward the train station and found a restaurant that Emily had learned had the best hot chocolate in Europe. It was good, but I'm disappointed if that is really the best. We took the metro back to the station, had lunch and waited for our train. We got back to our apartment at bath time, so the kids took a bath, ate dinner, and went to sleep.