Paris

We arrived early Monday morning to St Pancras Station to catch the Eurostar to Paris arriving in at about 2pm and made our way to the apartment. The metro here is nowhere near as traveller friendly and we all carried our bags up and down many stairs as the taxis were trying to charge us € 105 to go 2 kms!
Or apartment is in Montmartre to the north so we went for a stroll around the artisan streets and up to the Sacre Coeur..

The next days all the kids wanted to do was go up the Eiffel Tower. It was overcast but they could not be swayed from their desire to climb to the top! So we did. We could see lots from the first and second level but nothing from the top. Simon and I have been up a couple of times before so it was no big deal and still a very exciting to climb a spectacular monument.

We then went for a stroll past the Hotel de Invalides

And the past the Pont Alexandre III

Then onto Musee d’Orsay which has a wonderful collection covering a variety of art from 1848-1914, including a superb impressionist section. Works from Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and others we don’t really know!!!!! That is enough name dropping anyway!!
It used to be a train station so the building is also impressive.

Everyone knows Paris as ‘the romance capital’ and the ‘city for lovers’. Two years ago, a new fad started, when love-struck sweethearts started to lock padlocks onto the chain link fence on the Passerelle des Arts, which crosses from the left bank to the Louvre museum. The love padlocks, called ‘cadenas d’amour’, multiplied until there were more than 2,000 love tokens on the bridge, each one with an engraved message of love. After locking the love padlock onto the fence, the lovers tossed the keys into the Seine river – a sign of their eternal love. The kids had read about this and recognised the bridge as soon as we were near. They thought we should also add to the bridge and what do you know Simon just happened to have a spare pad lock in his back pack!!! Always resourceful!!!!

Then along the river for a stroll finding some interesting signs and wishing more people would take notice of this one!

And watching police ninjas flying down the Seine.

We made our way to Notre Dame for a quick look and then onto find Paris’ no 1 ice creamery to find that it is closed on Tuesdays!!

On our way back to the apartment we went past the Hotel de Ville which was beautifully lit up at night and had an ice skating rink still open so we watch a few people stumbling around on their skates before catching the metro home.