Day 2 (Oct 3rd): Paris in Paris and Normandy travel log

We woke up early to catch the guided walking tour included in our cruise. An 8:30 breakfast (it’s a fancy hotel and the breakfast had everything from crepes to scrambled eggs and cereals) and a 9:30 departure. The bus took us to Bastille. We started there, walked pass Place de Voges, stopped by Centre Des Monuments Nationaux, walked past the Jewish quarter, and ended up in City Hall. The tour was about an hour and a half (it was 11:30 when we were done) but I think if we had walked ourselves we could have covered the area in 20 minutes. He gave a lot of background information on the history - there is so much history - of everything we were looking at. So it was a lot of information.

After lunch (we went to a cafe on Ile de la Cite where I got a crepe and La Professeure got a Pannini), we decided not to go into Notre Dame because it was so crowded and we learned that the cruise proper’s tour will dump us there for 2 hours (!!). Instead we opted to go to the Sainte Chapalle next door. The church was pretty small, but the upper level stained glass was amazing. It was a sunny afternoon so it was bright inside, and the church entrance was controlled, so there were only admitting a fixed number of people inside, so that made for a nice visit. Well worth the wait to get in.

After Sainte Chapelle, we used the time we had budgeted for Notre Dame to walk down Boulevard Sainte-Michel toward the Luxemborg Gardens. La Professeure stopped to shop for a coat that she claims she needed, and we also stopped at a Starbucks (!!) for coffee and to rest our feet. We must have spent an hour stopping. After we were back on the street, La Professeure was impressed by the facade of Paris Sorbonne university. The Luxemborg garden was pretty; it reminded me of Central Park because that’s also where residents come to hang out too, so we have a mix of tourists and locals. So that was nice not to be spending time exclusively with selfie-stick-wielding tourists. We didn’t go inside the palace, but just walked across the garden from Medici fountain to the other side. The weather was perfect - not too hot or cold, but sunny, so that made for good walking weather.

We took the metro to Montmatre and immediately could tell it was a tourist spot. It was extremely crowded and tons of souvenir shops line the street. The walk up hill wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, so at least that was nice. The view of the city was a bit hazy, nothing like the day before. But the Sacre-Coeur Basilica was very big and beautiful. We were there in time for a choir service (6pm), at the time when the sun was setting and filling the hall with light, so it was very beautiful. The only downside was that there were security guards there who keeps shushing tourists (it was church so they want people to be quiet), but the only noise we heard was the shushing.

We made our way back to the metro, and got to the hotel via Monceau park. By the time we were back, it was already 7:30. We went back out to the Arc area to get food and go to a grocery store. To our delight, by the time we got back BBC was showing doctor who. We’d never seen an episode live. And I got to watch Match of the Day afterwards. So that was a nice way to veg after a long walking day.

Last updated October 23, 2015