This morning we hopped on a bus – and travelled through Paris to get to the Eiffel Tower.  The bus ride took about 30 min.  Getting out of the bus close to the Eiffel Tower was a wow moment – seeing the size of it was wow!

We had a booked time slot, and were a little early, and that is when we realised how cold it was.  William was dressed in shorts, and he was freezing.  Now as most of you know that William doesn’t feel the cold, so for him to be looking for a patch of sun to stand in while we waited tells you how cold it was.  I did not have my puffer jacket either, but I did have a thick sweater.  By the time our guide arrived we were freezing!

We got in quite quickly – through 2 lots of security and queued to get to the elevators – we were not going to walk it!  Our guide gave us the history while waiting.  It was built in 1889 and is 300m tall.

We first went to the second floor which is the viewing deck.  It was even more cold there than on the ground.  Unfortunately our guide went on and on and on with stories etc, until we (like many in the group before us) excused ourselves to go to the toilet and never returned.  We had purchased tickets to go to the top, so we got in the queue for this and went up the 200m odd to the top in an elevator.  Guess what, it was even more cold up there!  The views were great, but we did not feel that they were that much more spectacular that the second floor viewing deck, but nevertheless we were glad that we had gone to the top.  We then descended to the bottom, which was chilly, but not as bad as the top.  We bought some hot chocolate to warm up and caught a bus back for William to put on warmer clothes and for me to get my jacket.  And back on the bus we hopped – going back to the same place for us to have a cruise along the Seine River.  (We have purchased unlimited public transport tickets, you will be pleased to hear!)

The cruise along the Seine was not so great – firstly it was raining and secondly the commentary was not great, but it was interesting to put a bit of the geography together.  We were shown the Statue of Liberty – no you are reading correctly!  The Statue of Liberty was designed by Eiffel (I think) and so the US gave Paris a small Statue of Liberty.

After the cruise we hopped on another bus and after grabbing some lunch, we went to The Pantheon, which was interesting, and quite different to the Pantheon in Rome.  We came out of the Pantheon and it was raining hard, so we walked in the rain to find our Metro trains back to Monte Matre.  By the time we got back, the rain had stopped and we climbed to steps to Sacre Couer.  What a beautiful church.  We waited for a Mass to start so that we could hear the acoustics – lovely!  The church is on the top of the hill and so the views over Paris were magnificent!  We then realised that our transport tickets included the Funicular so we came down in style!  (And in future we will be going up in style too!)

We are both really tired, particularly of steps!

Tomorrow is Palace of Versailles…..