Our second day was planned to be things we could experience without purchasing tickets or waiting in line. We knew it was going to be a lot of walking and it was. It was cloudy and a bit cool but we both prefer that over it being too warm.
The route was given to me by my friend, Jerome Cornet, who lived in Paris and knew a good walking trip that you could experience lots of the beauty of Paris by just walking through it. He gave us a route on Komoot which we pretty closely followed and were not disappointed.
We started at Église Saint-Sulpice after stopping for breakfast on the way at Les Parisiennes. My eggs were undercooked as I struggled to get them to understand "over easy" in my broken French. We got a taste of the so-called stereotype of rude restaurant servers as they seemed to ignore us for even asking us for drinks or coffee for quite some time. But, they apologized and we got our food fairly quickly after that. The church was quite nice with a mix of some fully restored elements and some that clearly needed to be restored.
A fountain in front but not working - this seemed to be somewhat common in Paris this time of year - some fountains working, while others not. The great part about this church was that it wasn't very busy so we could explore at our leisure - unlike Notre Dame.
From there it was over to the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Palais Luxembourg. Many flowers were in bloom and there were a lot of students milling about. This seemed to be a bit of a theme for the week as we saw many high school tour groups at all the sites. A beautiful park with the Fontaine Médicis as another site to see there.
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| Luxembourg Palace |
A somewhat rare working fountain
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| Medici Fountain |
From there, a walk through the Latin Quarter toward the Notre Dame cathedral. Narrow streets and we must have walked past the "Shakespeare and Company" bookstore which is popular but we didn't really have an interest in seeing it. We
stop for lunch at
PeeBee's for some wood fired pizza which was quite good but Carrie got the Quattro Formaggi when she probably only wanted the Trio Formaggi or Duo Formaggi as she said there was too much cheese (those last 2 aren't really options to be clear 😁). After lunch we cross the Pont au Double over to the Île-de-France to see the Notre-Dame Cathedral. This is our first real taste of large crowds and after a few snaps of the outside of the church we head to the line to get inside which we actually have a bit of a hard time finding the end of it as it wraps around various street fixtures.
The line moves surprisingly quickly. Carrie discovers that over 30,000 visitors see this every day and I believe it. The cathedral is huge and at first, it seemed a little underwhelming as you don't see the rose window or any of the little chapels on the left and right sides as you first get in. The church has been well repaired and other than construction work on the outside, you wouldn't know it was devastated by a fire a few years ago. Carrie notes that it is a tad "dusty" in places - but hey, there is no entrance fee so maybe we were there on a day the cleaners were off.
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| Carrie lighting a candle at Notre Dame to pray for Shaun Bradley (our nephew just covering from major Chron's surgery) |
OK - underwhelming at first but pretty incredible once you walk all the way through it. A massive space with ornate beauty everywhere. Carrie was more interested in the collection of doggies out in front of the church at first. There are dogs everywhere - and many off leash but they were generally pretty well behaved and we didn't see any dog poop.
Next it was a walk over the Pont Neuf toward the Louvre. We see another line for another church - Saint-Chapelle but we are feeling churched-out for the day. That one apparently has some even grander stained glass but you have to fight FOMO and accept that you just can't see everything in one trip. The Pont Neuf is a lovely bridge (I judge all the bridges from the Seine river cruise later) but it has some nice places to park yourself for a brief rest.
I was glad we went to the Louvre before our scheduled ticketing time to see how big the crowds were and when one would have to arrive to get a reasonable place in line (even though you have scheduled ticket times, you still need to queue for the 30 minute blocks they allot for that). The building of the Louvre itself is grand and something to see just in itself.
We overhear a tour guide say: "Oh this is a great day, the crowds are really light" - and we see literally thousands of people. Next was the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel - the first of 2 arcs today.
Then onto Jardin des Tuileries a beautiful garden between the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. We grab a coffee there sitting right next to what we hoped was spilled chocolate milk.
Place de la Concorde was next with 2 fountains shouldering a giant obelisk. The fountains weren't working but if this is the trade off from even greater throngs of people in the peak seasons, we'll take it.
A water fountain for potable water is also elegant and we fill up our water bottle with it. We see other tourists checking to see if we drink it.
We pass by this lovely restaurant at the start of the Champs-Élysées. Carrie mentions that it would be a beautiful place to eat - and we end up eating there on Sunday (more on that experience on Sunday). The Champs-Élysées is very busy but his place is in a serene park setting with a (working!) fountain out front off to the side of the busy road.
Some of the intersection on Champs-Élysées are insane - cars everywhere and they don't move slowly. The roundabout around the Arc de Triomphe has 12 streets coming into it plus a bazillion tourists around it. Leading up to the Arc de Triomphe there are lots of high end stores but mostly stores you'd see in New York city so we didn't go in any of them. The Arc de Triomphe is quite a bit larger than the Arc in front of the Louvre and it was quite impressive. We didn't go up it though as you have to walk stairs and we had already walked some 22km to this point so we were done.
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| Tomb of the unknown soldier |
We head back and grab some cheese and wine from a grocery store. We enjoy that on the terrace and then head back to lie down for a few minutes before going out again for the night. Well, that few minutes turned into an over 12 hour "nap" - I guess we were exhausted.
