Paris

Off to Paris! The train ride was ok for the most part. Even though I took a Dramamine, I still had motion sickness after we arrived. We took the subway/train to our hotel which was about a block from a station. We stayed at a small, quaint hotel that had a small elevator that stopped in between floors. Only one person and one luggage fit at a time. I thought I could handle the stairs on the way down, but I was wrong and was not ready to handle that circular motion yet. I had to sleep off the motion sickness so we rested most of this day. Later that night, we had crepes for dinner from a street nearby our hotel that was full of creperie options, and just walked around our area.

The next day, we spent time exploring the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de triomphe, and a boat tour of the Seine River. We made our way back to the Eiffel Tower later that evening to watch it light up. The tower is magical at night time. I loved watching it sparkle. Later that night, we had dinner at a bistro on our block and loved every bite. This was probably Ryan's favorite restaurant we went to out of our entire trip. I'll have to ask him for the name and to explain this meal later.

On our third/second full day, we took a train out to Versailles. Ryan booked their private tour which they offer only twice a day. He originally wanted to book a different tour through some outside group, but we tried booking too late and couldn't get tickets. Luckily though, the tour we booked through the Palace of Versailles ended up being great. The Palace is beautiful and was full of history. We were given a private tour through other state apartments that general admission did not have access to and a guide to explain things to us. The best part of our tour was how it ended in the opera house. The various King Louies had only used that opera 17 times and then used another amphitheater in attempt to save money (but ended up costing more). After our tour, we were lead back to the beginning where you could go through with the general admission to see everything else. Again, everything is so beautiful here and we know why people say you can spend days visiting Versailles. It was gloomy and raining/drizzling on and off that day, so we didn't spend much time in the gardens. I know they are suppose to be beautiful, but some things were covered due to the weather, the big fountain was under construction, and you couldn't see very far to get a big picture of how wonderful the gardens really are.

I don't know if this will work, but I tried to take a 360 photo of the Opera house there.. hopefully you can see it.


After Versailles, we grabbed a quick lunch and then visited St. Chapelle and Notre Dame. Both churches were beautiful as well. We lit a candle for my mom at Notre Dame and spent some time there just taking it all in. While we were visiting these churches, we were also near a police station and heard car after car go out. We knew something was going on, but we had no idea until we got back to our hotel later that afternoon about the terrorist attacks at Charlie Hebdo, about 2-3 miles from where we were at the time. We weren't sure what to do at that point, but we rested and then decided to venture out. We honestly didn't notice much of a difference while getting around in Paris at the time, except our hotel had now locked their doors before letting people in and out and maybe additional armed men at the stations. We walked around the Louvre that evening since it was open late and got to see the Mona Lisa. Yet another beautiful place where you can spend a lot of time exploring. Too bad I was exhausted and my feet were killing me. We left the Louvre and made our way to Ponte de Arts bridge where lots of people have put locks on the gates of the bridge and then threw the keys into the Seine. I have read about this before going and said they aren't encouraging people to do this anymore because the locks have become so heavy, parts are falling off into the river. Sure enough, they had the sides of the bridge boarded up but it didn't stop people from putting locks on the gates near the bridge. We didn't add to the bridge, but just took some pictures. We finally made it back to our area of Paris, found a place for a late dinner, and then crashed.

We did too much that day. The next day, it was rainy but we made our way towards the Montmarte area to see what we could from the Basilica of Sacre Coeur. This basilica was of course beautiful as well. We walked a little bit around the Montmarte area and bought our souvenirs, checked out the Moulin Rouge, made our way to the Latin Quarter and stopped for lunch. We took a stroll through Luxembourg gardens before making our way back to the hotel. We were pretty exhausted by this point of our trip. We walked around another area of Paris and grabbed some hot chocolate, aka barely melted solid chocolate, from Angelina before headed back to our hotel to rest some more. As much as we loved how beautiful Paris was, we were ready to go home and wanted the comfort of being home. Ryan found a Vietnamese place with good reviews so we decided to give it a try and had some pretty good Pho that night for dinner. It was strange to be spoken to in French, yet I responded in Vietnamese, Ryan in English, and then to have the restaurant respond back to us in English. After dinner, we just went back to the hotel to repack and get ready to head to the airport the next morning.

We had no idea when we arrived at the airport that the two terrorist brothers were just spotted about 8 miles from there, that the airport shut down two runways due to the proximity to the activity at the moment, or that the killing of the policewoman the day before was again about 2-3 miles from us. There were a few extra screenings as we went through the airport and more searches of carry on luggage, but other than that, we didn't notice any crazy precautions that made us feel more on alert or know that anything was going on. It wasn't until we landed in D.C. for our layover and turned our phones off airplane mode that we finally found out. Our phones kept going off with everyone making sure we got out and if we were ok. After getting through customs, missing our connecting flight (even though the plane was just sitting there at the gate waiting for some extra service or something), and booking the next flight home, we were finally about to catch up on what happened in Paris while we were in the air. Definitely a memorable trip...

To end this long post on a lighter note, we loved Paris. We had a great long trip in Europe and got to explore places we had never been before. Great anniversary and babymoon trip even though it included some scary parts(we bought a newspaper to remember it and the front of the newspaper said "The French September 11th"). We even bought this for our little one.

No other trips booked at this point. Only trip to plan for now is parenthood and not-Dallas in July for Eric & Kaitlyn's wedding!