Paris Day 1 of 2

Hello to all of you following our trip through this blog. If you haven't heard, we are now in the city of Paris for the first of two days/nights we'll be here. We go back to London to catch a flight to Rome on Tuesday where we'll be spending the last leg of our trip.

Today we barely made it to the train station in time to get on the Euro star to get to Paris. When we were dropped off at the train station, a message came across the intercom that stated that this was the last call for the Euro star train leaving for Paris. We underestimated the time that it would take by cab to get to the train station and get through customs/border patrol. We were lucky that the customs/border patrol line wasn't too long and that we somehow made it through in time. When we ran up the escalator to board the train, the gentleman stated that we had just missed the train to Paris (Dana almost died via heart attack...), but he was just pulling our leg.

We made it to Paris in less than 2.5 hrs and then boarded the subway to get our hotel. The hotel is starkly different from our hotel in London. This hotel is not as new/modern as the one in London, but it has a lot more character, is closer to the attractions and has a nice balcony with a view. We then embarked on a mission to find something to eat and ran across several places nearby, one of which where we bought sandwiches on french baguettes and some kind of strawberry tart dessert. Both were very tasty.

Then we were off to see some of the sights of Paris since we'll only be here for around 36 hours. We walked down the hill and saw Notre Dame Church, so we decided to start there. We walked through the church, which was a pretty amazing site. We were able to get on one of the last tours of the day to climb roughly 375 stairs to the top of the dome of the church. There we saw amazing views of the entire city in every direction.

After leaving, we walked along the Sienne River and eventually wound our way through a few neighborhoods to an area that had a lot of restaurants to choose from. The restaurant had a nice view of the area, but both of our meals weren't the best we've had on the trip so far. Afterwards, we went by a local crepe desert shop and enjoyed a good tasting inexpensive desert.

With it being almost 9:00, we decided that it would be fun to take a boat tour of the city to catch a glimpse of all of the major monuments and attractions lit up at night. This was an enjoyable boat ride in which we were able to see so much of the City of Lights and get a lot of good pictures of all of the monuments at night. I would have to say that the Eiffel Tower was our favorite, but Notre Dame was a close second. After the one hour boat ride, we were both pretty tired and decided to head back to the hotel for the night.

Tomorrow we have lots of things planned including visiting the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum, the Arc de Triumph, and eating more good deserts, just to name a few. I'm sure it will be a great day and of course we'll keep you all informed of the day's activities as usual with our daily blog. We'll be posting some pictures of today's fun. Stay tuned for the rest of our journey across Europe.