Paris - October 5

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Paris - October 5

(Geoff) We had breakfast in the hotel and then got organised to get our Paris passes. This meant getting ourselves organised on the metro to get to the Hard Rock cafe in the 9th Arrondissement. If I do say so myself, we managed this quite well and got there well before the 1:00 o'clock cutoff. Then off to the Gare St Lazare to organise TGV tickets for Amiens on Wednesday. We still have to organise tickets to get us to Versailles but we can do that tomorrow.

We decide to walk into the city centre from here and, even though there is once again a cold wind blowing, it lets us see people and buildings that we otherwise would miss. We have a quick lunch and then walk into the Place de la Concorde. We visited here last night on the Segways and its good to see it again in daylight. There is an obelisk here right in the centre of the city that dates back about 3,500 years ...... makes me feel young! Then its across the Seine and time to visit our first museum - the Musee D'Orsay - our first use of the Paris pass. It was the first Sunday of the month and in Paris all its museums are free entry on this day. So as you can imagine, when we arrived there was a huge queue - when I asked the attendant informed he me that the average wait time was 2-3 hours. I was delighted that our pass got us into the short line (skip the queues, basically) and we were inside and through security within 10 minutes.

Our guide of the night before had advised us to start on the top floor (to see the famous impressionist artists) and work our way down. We took his advice and were rewarded with paintings by Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Tolousse-Lautrec and Renoir (and lots of others). The art was fabulous and we loved it! In all we spent nearly 3 hours here and could easily have spent a full day, but exhaustion got the better of us. Then it was off to the metro and after three train changes, back to the hotel. For me, its an early night and then off to the Louvre tomorrow.

Till then, au revoir.

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