London and Paris

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Our trip continued on a very fast train to London where we briefly walked through waist deep crowds to Harrods and turned for home. The London underground does not function very well on a Sunday and we stood for half an hour at 11pm in the rain waiting for the replacement bus. Our apartment was very comfortable but a long way out of town. In the evening we went to the Royal Albert Hall and were thrilled with a wonderful performance by the massed bands of the Royal Marines.

Next morning we went to St Pancras (Gillian called it St Pancreas) and made a two and a half hour trip at over 200kph to Paris.

We stayed in a very nice (expensive) part of Paris and were thing of selling the grandchildren to pay for the prices in the restaurants; however we kept looking until we found eating places where no one spoke English, it was full of French people and the food was good and cheap. The Louvre lived up to our expectation and we spent an entire morning there. By lunchtime the queue to get in was enormous, so we were thankful that we arrived at opening time. We went to the French War Museum and saw a very dangerous looking gun (that is to the operators) and then on to Napoleon’s tomb. We became expert Metro travellers which is a good skill learned from Snakes and Ladders. Then on to a Bateau Mouche for a cruise on the Seine . We walked every day for at least five hours and climbed down the Eiffel Tower 400 steps and up Montmartre where we gave up counting the steps from the underground to the summit when we reached 500. We concluded that our hearts are in reasonable shape since we made it all the way.

Five hours after leaving Paris we were back in Bristol where we will rest until tomorrow when we go to the Isle of Man.

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