Day 18 - a full day in Paris. And a full day it was! We started with a bike tour of spots off the beaten trail. This tour company (wisely) assumed you could get yourself to the Eiffel Tower without them and showed us more unique sites in the city of lights. We enjoyed exploring the place Victor Hugo wrote Les Mis, the building with a cannonball still stuck in the side from the French Revolution, the Latin quarter (not hispanic, as it turns out, but near the Sorbonne and the students had to speak Latin who went there, hence the name). We had a nice lunch there from a street vendor and continued our ride. We saw the modern art museum and the interesting area filled with musicians and other creative things. Our tour guide showed us a little known entrance to the Louvre, which we used the next day but still would have faced long lines. We rode past Notre Dame, which we saw yesterday, and Sainte Chapelle, which we will try to see tomorrow. It was a great ride and our tour guide, a young woman from Holland, spoke excellent English. After our ride, we walked about town a bunch and made our way to the Arc du Triomphe, then went back to our hotel to rest before dinner. We were so tired and footsore we decided to eat at the hotel rather than hunt down a hotel. It was a good decision, because we were in a nice hotel and the dinner was good. After dinner, we took the bus to the Eiffel Tower for our 11 p.m. ride to the 2nd level. Great view, and a good time. The city is amazing at night.
Day 19 - our last day in Paris, boo. We were snookered by crowded entrance lines a couple of times in the a.m., first at the Louvre and then at St. Chapelle. If you don't have advance tickets and show up at least 30 min. before something opens in Paris, you might as well forget it. It will take hours in line to see things. The crowds are simply unbelievable, and we are not even here in the height of the season. The weather wasn't even particularly great, cool and cloudy, but the people are here. I can't imagine visiting Paris in the summertime. All you'd need to add to this is heat and even more people, and I'd have to flee for my life. I didn't have my heart set on seeing either of theses sites, so no big deal. I'd have liked to visit another art museum, but we were sufficiently annoyed at the crowds at this point that we determined to find a nice cafe for lunch and head out to the cemetery. Not to be checked in, mind you, just for a visit. There is a fantastic old cemetery here where a lot of famous people are buried. After having visited the old cemetery in New Orleans and enjoying it, we figured this would be even better, and it was. It is old and creepy and also beautiful, with the plants and statuary and the general decay of things. Moliere, Chopin, Sarah Bernhart (american actress), Jim Morrison (the Doors rock star), Oscar Wilde, the list goes on and on. Oh, before the cemetery, we visited Shakespeare and Co., a famous bookstore in Paris where Jack Kerouac and other famous authors used to hang out. It is really neat. A section devoted to beat poetry. Chuck bought a book there to read on the way home. After all our running around Paris, it is time to leave, sadly. I could do with one more day here. We get our train to Calais and on to the tunnel under the English Channel. in the US, we tend to refer to this as the Chunnel, but that is definitely "out" here. It was one of the high speed trains, you get from Paris to London in 2.5 hours. It was night time and I couldn't even tell when we were under the channel other than the air smelled different, pumped in. At its deepest point, the tunnel is 800 feet below sea level.
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