La Vie en France: February EuroTrip Part 1: Paris on Speed

I've really been meaning to post a blog about the family trip that we had in February, but I haven't gotten around to it. It was brought to my attention that this is long overdue so I am going to document the trip for my own records and for anyone who reads! My Mom, Ernie, Matt, Megan and Megan's Mom all came over to visit me for a week during my February vacation.

Well first of all I'd like to say that the amount of things we did within two days in Paris was just not human. If I had to do it again, I don't think I could.

After I picked up a drowsy bunch from the airport at 7:30AM on Friday morning, we took our stuff back to the hotel and I gave everyone an hour or so to chill out, shower, etc. The calm before the storm. After that we had a quick coffee, and decided to just jump right into our day of tourism, head first. We started off with the big one: the Eiffel Tower. This is one thing that will never get old, it's always fun to see, and even more fun to go up. The view of Paris is amazing. Unfortunately we really didn't have the best weather, but that's no surprise considering it was February.

After the Eiffel Tower we had lunch over by Notre Dame, and then spent some time visiting the Notre Dame cathedral. I was expecting everyone to crash since we were already into the late afternoon, but they all made a miraculous recovery during a fun photo session playing with Megan's new panoramic camera behind Notre Dame and near the Ile-Saint-Louis area, followed by a coffee break in a nearby café. I decided to continue on with the ultimate day of tourism and keep them moving while they were still semi-conscious. We headed for the Champs-Elysées, to get a glimpse of Paris's famous shopping street, as well as the Arc de Triomphe, which is lit up beautifully at night. We took a walk around the world famous Louis Vuitton store (while fighting the swarms of asian tourists, of course), tried to take in the view of the Arc de Triomphe, and and then headed all the way back up to Montmartre which one of my favorite areas of Paris. You have to take a short little funicular to get up to the area, but it's well worth it for yet another great view of Paris. This is where all of the artists used to hang out back in the day (Van Gogh, Dali, Monet, Picasso) and I think that it's Paris's most picturesque area. We found a restaurant, and finally sat down long enough to take a breath and soak in our day's accomplishments. I think we must have taken the metro about ten times, making our day passes well worth it.

When we got back to the hotel, I was impressed with everyone's stamina, as some of us even stayed up for late night drinks in the hotel room. I of course generously gave them a full 9 hours to rest up before we started it all over again the next day.

The next day was much more calm, but we had pretty limited time since we had to jet set over to Cologne on a 6p.m. train. We started our day off visiting my favorite museum, Musée de l'Orangerie. This is a perfect museum to visit in Paris if you don't have a lot of time. You get to see some beautiful French impressionism, specifically two huge rooms covered in Monet's water lilies, and it's not nearly as overwhelming or time-consuming as other museums such as the Louvre or Musée d'Orsay. Afterwards we walked through the extremely "posh" area near the Tuileries gardens in the 1st arrondissement, ending up at Place du Vendome. Our plan was to head down to see the Catacombs of Paris, which was Megan's only wish on her trip to Paris. We were pretty let down when we got there to find an hour long line full of hundreds of other tourists with the same idea. She was a good sport about it though! Since we really didn't have much time, we just had a nice lunch in the same area, and headed back to the hotel with just enough time to grab our luggage, sandwiches and some drinks for our three hour train ride over to Cologne. More to come...
p.s. Thank you Megan for the beautiful photos that I stole from you, I don't have any of my own! Click on the pics to see a better view of them