La vie est belle!
Paris!
I have been dreaming of going to paris since….forever! Honestly, I can’t remember when my love affair with France began. My family is French, so I guess I was born with it. But really, I could not have been happier about our 4 day pit-stop to Paris on our way to Barcelona. As soon as we landed I could feel it, there was something in the air there that just felt so…je ne sais quoi!
As we were driving to our Air BnB, I could not keep my mouth shut. I know the taxi driver probably thought I was such an annoying American tourist gawking at all of the architecture and asking “quest que cest?” at everything we passed. I still can’t get over how pretty everything is there.
When we got to our Air BnB, we crashed. A lengthy 3 hour nap for me and Austin while Skyler indulged on more Mickey Mouse, which was a definite no for the rules of beating jet-lag…whoops! We quickly realized that this little apartment would not work for us. It was tiny, like…tiny, and the heater did not work. We made the move to a nice hotel that was next to the yummiest cafes. We were much happier and warmer here. Since it was New Year’s Eve, we decided to ring in the new year at the Eiffel Tower. Let me tell you, stealing a kiss from Austin at midnight in Paris under that twinkling tower- may be one of the top 5 romantic things I’ve ever done! I highly suggest you add that to your bucket list.
That next day we didn’t wake up until 2:30pm! We were so mixed up on time. We hurried and got ready so we wouldn’t miss any more of our time in Paris. We went to the Louvre, only to find it was closed for New Year’s. So we bought a lock and headed to the love lock bridge. We locked it on to the bridge, kissed the key and threw it in to the Seine River- locking our love for eternity. Then we got tickets for a hop-on, hop-off bus and went around the city. Skyler wanted to sit by herself on the bus and waved to everyone while saying “bonjour!”, it was pretty cute! We saw so many amazing sites, one of our favorites was Notre Dame. I also found out that there is a grave of an unknown soldier under the Arc De Triomphe with an eternal flame. I didn’t know that before.
Day three was spent at the Louvre. The line at the main entrance was SO long. Luckily, we read a tip that said there are actually 4 entrances, but most tourists don’t know that. We stumbled across one of the other entrances and walked right in! Honestly, I wish I could say we had an amazing time there, but it was just too crowded and too long for Skyler to sit patiently for. We had to find our way through the maze of crop-dusting tourists to find elevators for the stroller and shove our way through to see the paintings. I hope I can go back again some day when it is way less crowded and really enjoy the museum. Seeing the Mona Lisa was fun, though. My favorite was Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks.
On our last day, we went to Versailles. We were all really excited to see this. We knew it would be expensive to get a taxi there, but decided it would be worth it. When we got there, it started pouring rain and was so windy. We were freezing and greeted with an even longer line than the one at the Louvre the day before. We decided to try and buy a private guided tour to skip the line. We found out that there were no tours that day – we had no choice but to wait in the line out in the cold. As sad as we were to not get to go in, we thought it would be best to get Skyler out of the weather and just go back. On our way to get a taxi, we saw a guard standing at a side door. We asked him if there was any way he would let us in that door. He stood there a while, thinking, and we knew it wasn’t likely, but then he smiled and let us in. Not only did we skip that huge line, but he also let us in for free! Fun side story: a nice man offered to take a picture for us, and when he spoke to us in English, we asked where he was from. He was from Utah, too! He and his group of friends were in Europe on a ski trip. They were heading to Barcelona after Paris, like us and we even saw them at church the next week in Barcelona! The castle was amazing and so much bigger than I knew. Since it was such bad weather, we only saw the gardens from the windows- but that’s just a reason to go back some day.
We saw so many things and ate so much yummy food – I made it a point to eat as many croissants as I could while I was there. I absolutely love Paris and am so glad we are flying back home through there so we get to go back!
Bopper and Baby 