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Published: March 13th 2023
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So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.-Jack Kerouac
I was on the fence about writing another travel blog for this trip, but here I am. Apparently there is a few people that still read it and were asking about it prior to our departure. Sometimes I feel the more ordinary trips in accessible countries don't deserve the same amount of chronicling, but then again these are the trips people are most interested in because it is recognizable and within easy reach for their own travels.
As with all our trips I utilized my credit card miles to purchase the airfare, this time through a KLM credit card signup bonus. This time we needed to unfortunately fly out of LAX to score the deal, our most hated airport. However it was a direct red eye flight into Paris so all in all we couldn't complain. Paris is somewhere neither of us had ever been so it seemed like a perfect hub to fly into, albeit for less than 24 hrs. Truth be told 24 hrs is all we needed to see the highlights and get a sense of the city and whether or not
we needed to return for a longer stay.
The original plan was we were to take the 1 1/2 hrs long Eurostar train the following morning from Paris to London, so I had booked a hotel (Hotel Belges), right across the road from the station, and an easy 30 minute train right from the airport. We dropped our bags by early afternoon and we first walked to the Montemarte area of Paris. Montemarte is one of the oldest villages within Paris, and is where you find the iconic small alleyways lined with cafes and art galleries. We walked up to the hilltop to the Sacre-Couer basilica, dedicated to the patron saint of France, St. Denis, who was beheaded here. I learned about the origins of the name Dennis, and what a cephalophore is and the unique challenges it poses to artists oh where to put a halo on a beheaded head.
We walked down to the most famous area of Paris, the plaza de Concorde, getting caught in some protests and police riot squads along the way. Little did we know that in the preceding days there were massive strikes around the country, disrupting all modes of transport.
They were protesting the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64 here due to the economic struggles they are having.
We finished our day strolling past the Louve and up the Seine river and to the Eiffel Tower in time for dinner. I picked a beautiful little restaurant (Au Bon Accueil) ,. situated within a block of the tower to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, taking in the food and the best of Paris at night. After a long jet lagged day logging over 10 miles walking all over Paris, we headed back to our hotel. I was notified our train was canceled the following morning due to the strikes so we had to spend our night scrambling to find some way to London. All the trains and planes were canceled or overbooked, but we finally managed to find a bus that wasn't astronomically overpriced because of the surge. Ah the joys and stresses of travel. Well we were both saying how it would be fun to cross the English Channel and see the cliffs of Dover one day!
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