Days 1-3: Traveling & Paris, France

As I'd mentioned in the earlier post, we celebrated Riki's graduation on Sunday, and were on our first flight bright and early on Monday morning to San Francisco (6 hours). After a few hours there, we hopped on our second of three flights to Heathrow...and on that 10.5 hour flight, we were lucky to get an extra row so that Ryan could stretch out and pass out most of the way there. He gets air sick, and the Bonine tends to knock him out.

Our third and final flight that day (a short hopper from Heathrow to Paris) had us landing in the afternoon there, so we had booked a hotel there right near the airport so we could all go to bed early and pass out. 

The next AM, we had a big breakfast buffet at the hotel (they're often included in Europe) and then hopped a train into the city. We had to transfer to the subway, where we caught our first triple decker car (there were stairs going down and up) into the city center.

We quickly walked about 1/4 mile from the station to our hotel (Courtyard by Marriott Paris near Gare du Nord station), and checked our bags in. Then we hopped back on the subway over to Champs Elysees for a walking tour Ryan had planned weeks in advance. We had lunch right on the main drive, and then walked over to the Arc de Triomphe. It had changed quite a bit since we were last there about 12-15 years ago...less bougie and more...modest? There is a McDonalds, a Nike and a Five Guys...and the Louis Vuitton looked so much more subtle (I used to love the over the top giant suitcase entrance). 

Ryan noticed people at the top the Arc, so we paid the 13 Euro each to climb up. I remember visiting it years ago and wishing we had the money to go up, so it was a nice treat to be able to do it with more resources under our belt on this go round.

The underneath of the Arc

There were 290 spiraling stairs to the top...it was a hair tiring, but mostly made me dizzy!

The weather was perfect, and the views from the stop were stunning, as you could see tree-lined streets in every directions. It felt like we were in the center of the universe, and the climb offered us a great view of the urbanized downtown, and the Eiffel Tower. 

From there, Ryan took us to a piano store, where we spent about 45 min. watching try out a number of pianos...the one he liked best for it's 'warm' sound was only 3900 Euro, even though he tried one ten times the cost at 39,000 Euro!

We convinced him to leave, and he resumed his walking tour for us...over to the Eiffel Tower.

At the point that we booked this trip (semi-last minute), we were unable to get advance tickets to the tower, and had to stand in the general line for tickets...which was about an hour long. But- we were super thrilled to get some to the top, as it said earlier that the top level was closed. The only bummer was that there was no stair-climbing option (which is how Rich and I climbed it back in the day).

A view from the tippy top of the tower

At this point, it was already about 5-6pm, so headed back by train to our hotel, and checked into our room...which was quite spacious and offered a few of the city! We were anxious to see the city lights that night, but since it didn't get dark until about 10pm (the sun set about 9:30pm), I think we missed it the first night, as we all passed out pretty early.

In fact, we were so tired when we got to the hotel that we ordered Uber Eats pizzas as we didn't feel like going out. Once we ate, Rich and I caught a second wind and headed back out to try and find a grocery store...which took two failed attempts (first one had closed, the second one was more like a 7-11, and the third was fine).

Ryan had wanted to go to the Eiffel Tower when he was about 8, so it felt like a success to have ticked this off his bucket list (even though he was far more impressed with the piano store than the tower)!