Sept 13-14 Vive la Paris🇫🇷

September 16, 2024

Probably both Don and I could be accused of having two left feet most of the time, but we both conjured a happy dance worthy of Fred Astaire when we managed to turn in our rental car free of blemishes at the Heathrow Airport. Our dance would have been even happier if I hadn’t mucked up the very last roundabout before the Enterprise lot. This resulted in an inescapable tour of one of Heathrow’s parking towers that cost 7 1/2 pounds and some unneeded anxiety to remedy. Nonetheless, we were glad to have wasted all the insurance we bought, and took the underground to St. Pancras Station where we boarded our Eurostar train for Paris.
This proved to be a great way to travel. We were able to play card games because of the large table between our seats. The lunch served was really good and there was enough free wine that we forgot who won the card game. We arrived in Paris after traversing the French countryside and several temperate zones, and then walked the short distance to our hotel, Le Grand Quartier.
After a solid night’s sleep, we were gung ho for our first day’s adventure in Paris. We had prepurchased tickets to the Palace of Versailles. All we needed to do was figure out the Paris metro system in order to get there… no easy task. The French need to be complimented for their equal opportunity signage effort in their tunnels. Their signage is inadequate both in English and in French. We figured out that we needed to look for track # 8 to get where we were going. We followed a corridor, went up a staircase , down another corridor, went down a staircase, along another corridor, up another staircase, and down anther corridor, at which point someboby noticed that the graffiti was identical in each of the corridors and stairwells. We were in an endless loop, so we stood by a track that was not numbered 8 and caught the right train. All good until we reached the other end of the line and I couldn’t get through the turnstile because my metro pass wouldn’t work. I think I tried five different gates before I determined that the card I was trying to use was, in fact, my hotel room key card. Duh!
Versailles itself was magnificent. We visited the grounds in the morning and saw just a bit of them, then had a self-guided tour of the Palace in the afternoon. This proved to be a thorough education in interior decorating and beheadings, and we came away pretty overwhelmed by the experience. Then we were allowed to reenter the grounds, but only if we used a particular gate that was inconveniently situated over a kilometre away. It seemed a silly rule, but we abided by it because the grounds were amazing. There are 2000 acres of gardens and fountains and sculptures, topped off with a magnificent Grand Canal. We were treated to a musical dancing fountain show before we finally headed back out to try our luck with the transit system once again.
It turned out that we were a lot more proficient than on the morning run, and we were brave enough to jump off the train at different spot because we’d heard that Gustav Eiffel had built a big tower there. It was a pretty breathtaking moment for all of us to get that first glimpse of Paris’s most famous landmark.
Then, to top the whole experience off, we looked up to discover red, blue, and white streaks of smoke jetting across the sky. The French Air Force’s precision acrobatics team was putting on a show, we think in honour of the wind down of the Paris 2024 Olympic experience. What a thrill for us to see both of these spectacles simultaneously. We were extremely satisfied with our day, and walked along the Seine for a ways before finding another Metro station where we could hop aboard a train and make our way back to the hotel.