A Nice Day for a Walk

April 6 – Paris – Day 2

The beds are just tiny bit on the hard side, but comfortable, and the pillows are divine!! We are hoping to stay here again the day before we fly out.

We kept waking up and going back to sleep, and by the time I finally checked what time it was, it was 10:50! We slept for over 12 hours. It’s a good thing we were planing on taking it easier today.

We got up and got ready, and headed off to eat lunch near the catacombs. We found a great little cafe with teenytiny little tables. It was a little colder this morning, and they had the outdoor heaters on. I don’t think we needed it. I was sitting right under it and felt like I might be getting a sunburn from it.

I got the cod, and Heidi got the quiche. They were both delicious!

We went to stand in line for the catacombs. We decided not to get the handheld tour and just walked around on our own. We were right behind a large group with a guide, and when we wanted to read the info in the room their group was in, she told us to keep going, and I said we wanted to read the info. So she said she would go into the next room, and of course we were done after 2 minutes, and she got mad when we went back into the other room. She was acting like we were trying to get a free tour out of it. It was really annoying, so we just skipped that room.

You have to walk a ways down a long tunnel. I was short enough that I probably didn’t have to duck at all, but I felt like it. Anyone taller than me probably wouldn’t have been very comfortable. So you walk a lot, and there’s nothing, and then suddenly you’re there. It’s a bit mind blowing. At first I thought there were skulls stacked between some rocks, but no, those are more bones. It’s all femurs and tibias. 6 million people. It was really pretty humbling to be there.

There was an English man with his son behind us, and the boy was so cute. He kept exclaiming about everything. “These used to be people just like us, and they’re here and they’re objects. What if that happened to us?” And Heidi turned to me and said, “it’s going to.”

It wasn’t really what I was expecting, but I don’t really know what I was expecting in the first place. I mean, I was thought there would be a lot of bones, but there were really a lot of bones.

We got back on the subway and headed to the Eiffel Tower. I wanted to come at it from the mall, and it was prettier than the approach we took yesterday. It was cloudy and windy, and getting quite a bit colder. I’m glad we skipped it last night though, because it really did take quite a while.

It was a lot of standing in lines. Stand in line to get tickets, stand in line to go up, stand in line to go up again, and stand in line to come down, twice. It was actually really cold up there, and it had just started to rain. It didn’t even cross my mind to take a panorama until we got down to the bottom, so I told Heidi we had to go back up. We didn’t.

It was raining, but not much, so we decided to see if we could walk to the Arc de Triomphe. We had just been up the Eiffel Tower, so we didn’t feel like paying 10E to walk up 300 steps to the top of it to look around. We just took pictures from across the circle. It looked like they were having some sort of military ceremony anyway.

Then we started walking down the Champs-Elysées. There are some super expensive shops there. The sidewalk is granite, and it was raining, so it was a little slippery. We had talked about walking all the way to the Tuileries Garden, but we were getting wet, and it was almost 7 pm, and we saw a metro entrance.

We are getting pretty good at the metro thing. We headed back to the hotel and asked reception for dinner recommendations. He sent us to Vertigo, which was just two blocks away.

A lot of their food seemed very Spanish, but it was still very good. I decided to get two entrees instead of a main plate. I got mushroom soup, and an anchovy thing with roasted red peppers and olives (eaten spread on bread). They were both delicious! Heidi got the cod.

We haven’t eaten at a place with a full menu yet, but I’m sure we will.

Another fulfilling day! We are planning on actually setting an alarm for tomorrow, but it’s almost supposed to storm in the afternoon, so we’ll see what happens.