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Published: September 22nd 2006
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After a largely sleepless night and an alarm blaring at 2.45am our much anticipated trip to France was under way. We waited over half an hour on a cold Dublin street for an airport bus that never showed before giving in and getting a taxi out to the airport.
We arrived about 8.30am in Nantes to be greeted by Brad and some horrible weather. We were chauffeured to Brad’s partner’s (Sophie) parents place which is about 45km out of Nantes, where we were treated to a lovely breakfast of croissants and French sticks. We cruised out to the small town of Clisson where we had lunch and a bit of a wander around in the rain.
We were meant to be sleeping in tents on Friday and Saturday nights, but the weather and a double booking meant Sophie’s parents had about 12 extra people staying in their house on Friday night. Saturday brought some respite from the rain and Anna and the other girls headed on the train into Nantes for a look around while Jared and the boys prepared things for Brad’s birthday party that night.
We started to set up our tent at about 7pm on
Saturday and didn’t get very far before finding out that the framing poles for our tent had been misplaced! So we had to relocate our campsite to between a few trees and literally tie our tent up to the trees. This meant that we couldn’t put the fly directly over our tent so we were quite relieved when the rain stayed away and we were able to keep relatively dry.
The second phase of our trip began on Sunday when we got the TGV train from Nantes to Paris. This train does the journey in about 2 hours (its 400km) so its moving pretty quick. You don’t realise how fast it is actually going until you travel alongside the motorway where cars are traveling 130km/hr and you cruise past them as though they are standing still!
After checking into our hotel we set off to explore the sights of Paris, first stop was over the Seine River and onto Notre Dame, we had already been to Notre Dame Cathedral in Ho Chi Minh City and the French version was still very impressive and very huge, but had a sense that I’d been there before. We walked alongside the
river down to the Louvre but decided against going in as it was pretty busy. So next stop was the Eiffel Tower. It was a reasonable day and the queue here wasn’t too long so we took the elevators right to the top and had an amazing view over Paris, after soaking this up for a while we headed back to our hotel before going out for a very nice meal at a lovely little restaurant.
On Monday we had another breakfast of croissants before we went to the Louvre as the weather was a little bit dodgy, we wandered around and saw lots of famous and not so famous artworks. The Louvre is massive and you could quite easily spend days there, not surprisingly the largest group of people were gathered around the Mona Lisa. It is far smaller in real life than I had imagined and it was unbelievable how many people still try and take photos of it when there are about a million signs in every single possible language requesting that you don’t take photos! From here we went for a wander down the Champs Elysees, where we stopped for lunch at a little café
before we carried on to see the Arc de Triomphe which is situated in the middle of the busiest roundabout in Paris. The other place to go on our list was Sacre Coeur which is on the hill of Montmartre we trekked up the stairs to be accosted by some guys selling plaited cotton bracelets, they wanted to sell us one each for €15 (NZ$30!) they would not let us walk away without the bracelets so luckily all we had on us was about €2.30 which they finally took when they realised they weren’t going to get anything else from us. We tried to find the Moulin Rouge but our navigational skills weren’t too hot and we gave up and cruised back into the city for the rest of the day before getting a late night flight back to Dublin.
Overall, was a little disappointed with Paris, I think this was largely due to such high expectations. The sights are amazing but the city is just another big city really, was good to go and experience it though and of course we were able to eat chocolate croissants any time day or night!
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