We pedaled into Paris just as the weather here in Europe began to turn to fall. Mornings have been crisp and cold, making it more difficult to get out of our warm tent and on the road. But from Normandy, we took three days to ride into the beautiful capital of France, a city we’ve been looking forward to for quite a while!
Of course, we took some time to ride our bikes out to the Eiffel Tower for the typical tourist shot.
We only had three days to spend in this beautiful city, which is, of course, not nearly enough. But we had wonderful hosts through warmshowers.org, who helped us use our time and see some of the highlights. On our first day, we visited the montmartre area, which has a lovely cathedral and winding cobblestone streets. The cathedral is poised atop one of the bigger hills in town, and provides a lovely view over the city. As we were walking around in this area, we even heard the sound of stereotypical French music in the air… a song about Paris, coming from a guy playing a music box in a small plaza area. Perfect!
On the walk up to the top, there were people everywhere having picnics in the grass.
Also, we made a visit to the Arc de Triomphe. This might sound naive, but we hadn’t realized how HUGE that thing is!
We spent a morning at the Louvre, and unfortunately arrived there to realize we had left our camera at the apartment! So disappointing. So we stood in line (and got pushed around quite a bit) to see the Mona Lisa and couldn’t even take a picture to document it! Oh well. With all the crowd, it would have been quite difficult to get a nice photo anyway. While we didn’t find the Mona Lisa necessarily spectacular, we did enjoy several other paintings and sculptures we saw, and the “Napoleonic Apartments” section of the Louvre… definitely underrated! That was our favorite part!
We also managed to meet up with Bethany’s former roommate, Keri Anne, and her husband Will! They are living in Paris for a few months on a short-term mission project working with South Asians in the city. It was such a treat to meet up for lunch then a visit to the Notre Dame Cathedral. Luckily Keri Anne had a camera handy, since we didn’t have time to go back to the apartment for ours.
Our visit to Notre Dame! It is always a blessing for us to see a familiar face.
Our awesome hosts, Estelle and Thomas, were part of what made our time in Paris so great. On our last night, Thomas took us out to see a theater piece, (in full English!), “How to Become Parisian in One Hour.” Absolutely hilarious! It was a one-man show that played on all the typical Parisian stereotypes… we loved it! Then they took us to see the Tower by night, which was spectacular. Every hour after dark, it lights up with a fantastic display of sparkling LED lights. There’s really nothing quite like it.
Once again, we feel like warmshowers has provided us not only with great hosts, but with friends for life!
