Tag Archives: France

Paris and Versailles

DISCLAIMER: Julie wrote this post.

After our arrival into Paris, we decided we wouldn’t be true tourists if the first thing we saw was not the Eiffel tower.  Therefore, to the Eiffel Tower we went.  We had to open a bottle of champagne under the tower.  This was very important to Julie as she was able to cross it off her bucket list.  It also happened to be night, so we were able to view it with all of the lights on.  Also, every hour it has a light show so we were able to see that as well.

Eiffel Tower at night
Eiffel Tower at night

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Normandy

After crossing the Channel tunnel into France and taking another train west out of Paris, we finally arrived at Caen, France.  Caen is the largest town in the Normandy region on France.  We located our rental car and hotel and then headed over to the Memorial Museum.

Memorial Museum in Caen, France
Memorial Museum in Caen, France

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Paris Part 1: Arrival

I haven’t updated the blog in a while.  This isn’t because of lack of wifi, but rather we have been very busy in Paris.  We’re leaving Paris tonight for Venice, so here it goes from the beginning.

From Amsterdam, Lyle and I had train troubles.  A lot of train troubles.  The high speed train we were supposed to be on was overbooked or something so we had to catch another train to Antwerp to switch.  We missed that train so we waited an hour at the Amsterdam train station before finally leaving for Antwerp.  From there, we took a train to Lille-Flanders station (south Belgium) and finally a high speed train to Paris Nord station.  There it goes downhill.

Our hotel is on the SW corner of Paris and Paris Nord is NE corner.  We decide to take the underground metro to our hotel.  The people at the visitor center don’t speak English so they write down a list of stops and changes we need to take.  We end up getting on the wrong subway a couple times and end up on the East side of Paris.  17 stops and 4 changes later, we arrived close enough to our hotel to abandon the subway and walk.  There is a slight language barrier here that makes it difficult sometimes.

Enough complaining; here’s a picture.

View from our apartment in Paris (click to enlarge)

Our hotel is very near the Eiffel tower and just looking out the window it feels like we’re in Paris.