Paris is always a good idea

♦ April 14, 2013 ♦ Leave a comment

Paris marked the start of our European Odyssey tour with Topdeck. The tour originally left from London however you could choose to join in Paris if you preferred. We chose to fly into Paris instead and meet the tour group there so we had the day free before having to meet our tour leader and group at the hotel at 5pm.

As we had the morning to ourselves we had a sleep-in and a relaxing morning in the hotel we’d been staying at near the Eiffel Tower before checking out around lunchtime (hooray for noon checkouts). We then left our luggage at the hotel and walked around the area for a little while before collecting our luggage and catching a taxi to the Hotel Ibis where we were to meet our tour group. We arrived early and hoped that we could at least leave our luggage there and go for a walk if we couldn’t check in, however upon arrival they checked us in straight away and we headed up to our room. Upon checking in we were told that the tour group was running late so our tour guide would meet us at 5:30pm, instead of 5pm, so we just hung around in our room, which had a view of the Eiffel Tower which was pretty nice. We headed down at about 5:30pm to meet our tour guide, Lyndsey before we met the rest of our tour group for an included dinner in the hotel restaurant at 6pm.

After dinner we headed back upstairs to grab our cameras etc. and then headed down to the car park where we first saw our bus and met our bus driver, Frenchy. We headed off on our city of lights tour through Paris, past the Opera Garnier (where the Phantom of the Opera is based), up the Champs-Elysees, around the eight lane roundabout surrounding the Arc de Triomphe, past the Ile de la Cite (where the Notre dame Cathedral is) and through the grounds of the Louvre where Frenchy skillfully fit the bus through the archways over the road. We ended up at the Palais de Chaillot at around 9pm, where we got off the bus and saw the Eiffel Tower’s hourly light show with all the sparkling lights. We all took some photos before continuing on our tour around Paris along the Seine River before heading back to our hotel for the night.

Our first full day on tour started with breakfast in the hotel restaurant before we headed down to the bus where Frenchy and Lyndsay dropped most of us off in Paris (except a few who decided to head out earlier or catch some more sleep and made their own way into town later). They made several drop offs, depending on where everyone wanted to start their day. As we were coming back to Paris at the end of our European adventure and didn’t have to pack as much of Paris into a single day, Jess and I got dropped off near the Eiffel Tower. We walked around the Eiffel Tower and looked around a little market along the Seine River, before heading across the bridge to the Trocadero gardens. We wandered up the path alongside the Fountain of Warsaw heading up to take some more photos of the Eiffel Tower. We took some photos and then wandered down through the park around the fountain.

As it was quite a warm day we decided to head indoors for a while before heading back out. There are several museums behind/above the Trocadero gardens at the Palais du Challiot, however, we skipped these museums and instead headed to “Cine Aqua”, the Paris Aquarium. Despite the sign outside saying “not just another aquarium” it was pretty much your basic aquarium, only with several ‘mini-theatres’ which played documentaries (in French, so we tended to skip over these pretty quickly) about the ocean and the creatures living there. The aquarium wasn’t very big and especially since we didn’t sit and watch a the movies we went though easily in an hour or two and wasn’t cheap (I think around 20 euros for adults) but it was fun nonetheless. There is also a cafe (and souvenir shop of course) but we decided to head outside for lunch instead.

At the bottom of the Trocadero gardens was a little food cart where we bought a panini and a drink each and pulled up a patch of grass and took part in one of the Parisians’ favourite pass times – people watching. After we had finished eating, the fountains started their display so we watched that and took some photos before wandering around the park some more. By mid afternoon, we found a patch of grass in the shade and just relaxed in the park with many other Paris locals and visitors enjoying a sunny Sunday. After some relaxing we headed back to the other side of the Seine and walked through the Parc Champ de Mars around the Eiffel tower and wandered down to the École Militaire before meeting the rest of the tour group for dinner.

A Topdeck specialty in Paris is having a picnic under the Eiffel Tower which was a lovely was to end the day in Paris. After dinner, we split into two groups for our optional extras – half of us headed off the Paradis Cabaret and the other half went on a night cruise up the Seine. Jess and I headed off to the Cabaret show which was interesting – along with singing and dancing there was also an aerial acrobat and a juggling unicyclist.

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