The bus tour takes you around the city to most of the tourist attractions, the first one for us being the Arc de Triomphe. Our plan was to travel the complete route in the bus, and then decide what to return to. As the bus stops at several stops for around five minutes, it enables you to have time to jump out, take a few pics, and jump back on again.
As soon as the top deck seats in the covered section of the bus were vacated, we scurried up there, and hogged the front seats. It was freezing!! We were already cold from sitting in the bottom of the bus, but at least there was some heat down there. We rugged ourselves up as much as possible and battened down for a cold ride.
The upside of the cold ride was that we could see things well in advance and get some good pics. Paris is full of wonderful buildings, and loads of sculptures everywhere.
By the time the bus got around to Notre Dame, we were so cold, and starting to get hungry, that we decided to depart the tour and find some lunch. We had a delicious meal in a nice restaurant, I finished with a hot chocolate, which came served like this .....chocolate swished around the sides of the cup, and the hot milk served separately.
After lunch, and after consulting our map, and our pleasant waiter, we decided to walk to the Eiffel Tower. Although it was cold the sun was out, and we were assured it was twenty minutes walk. We were able to walk on the promenade next to the Seine, free from traffic and crowds for half the distance, which actually turned out to be an hours walk, not twenty minutes. Talk about a bum steer, we would never have undertaken that walk!
However, seeing the tower was fairly simple, just a short queue to buy a ticket, and take the lift to the second level, where the most amazing views of Paris were to be seen. The tower is a mammoth structure, and after seeing it so much on the television and movies, it was wonderful to actually see it "in the flesh".
It is 320 meters high, or 1052 feet, containing 2 and 1/2 million rivets.
There is an average of 6 million visitors a year to the tower.
Aysha walked down the steps from the second level whilst we waited for the lift, and she reached the bottom first.
Aysha and I had a ride on a carousel, and we did a little souvenir shopping as well, before picking up our bus tour again. Paris put on a sunset for us, which was just lovely. From the bus I managed to picture the tower in the sunset.
Once our big red bus had deposited us next to the Paris Opera, we had a twenty minute walk back to our hotel. We were all exhausted when we finally arrived back, I think we had walked about ten miles today.
Location:Boulevard de Magenta,Paris,France
No comments:
Post a Comment