Paris!

I have arrived in Paris after a very long day of travel. My parents took Denise and me to the South Bend airport on Wednesday morning and we caught the South Shore train to Chicago. Our first glitch was that the ticket machine stopped working for the person before us, so we just got on the train and bought our tickets later. Not a big deal, but made us rush around a little more than we liked. We saw several people we knew on the South Shore, most going to Chicago for a Cubs game or The Taste of Chicago.

After arriving in downtown Chicago we walked about 3 blocks to the Blue Line train which we took to O’Hare airport. We then flew from Chicago to New York City. We were supposed to have a 3 hour layover until our flight to London, but that turned into almost a 5 hour layover since the flight was originally delayed an hour, then they were oversold and trying to get people to give up their seats, etc. etc. We finally left about 10:55pm. We made up time in the air (I think they overestimate flight times for situations such as this) and we arrived in London only about ½ late.

Susie and Rebecca were there to greet us after we had gone thru customs and gotten our luggage. We gave Rebecca some of our stuff we didn’t want to take to Paris, then caught our next flight from London to Paris with Susie joining us.

We met two other American women who were also heading into Paris. We figured out what train we needed to get on even though there was no one around to help us and their brochures in a variety of languages did not include English. Figured out how to buy a ticket to downtown and even got it to take our credit cards. (Here you have to hold your card in the reader for a long time instead of swiping it quickly like in the US.) We navigated through a busy train station at rush hour to change to the right line once into the city, but our hotel is right across the street from the Gard L’Est train station, so we didn’t have any problems finding it. It was now about 4:30 Paris time, a whole day and a half since we started this journey.

Denise and I took naps for a little bit while Susie looked at travel books, then we decided a good evening trip would be going to the Sacre – Coeur, the Sacred Heart Cathedral, on the hill overlooking London. This was recommended by my cousin Kevin and I’m glad we went. It was only a few train stops away from our hotel and it was a beautiful evening. The view was amazing and the cathedral itself was very nice as well. We even had a nice French man ask us if we needed help (in English!) and point us in the right direction up the hill. We also did some walking around near our hotel to check out the local restaurants and see about places we want to come back to.

Susie found free internet in the hotel lobby so I hope to post some pictures soon. (I typed this offline so I wouldn’t use up so much time online).

So far we have found Paris to be hotter and dirtier than we expected. We do have AC in our room but it struggles to keep up. We also have some nice windows overlooking the plaza and train station (we are on the top floor), but the AC turns off whenever we open the windows.