A couple of weeks ago was the kids’ fall break. I wrote this blog during 8 hours of train travel at the end of the trip, but haven't had a chance until now to add pictures and actually post it. So I'm a little behind. It's long, so I'll split it into 3 or 4 parts and post them separately.So, for fall break we had decided to take the opportunity to visit friends in Paris. Dan also wanted a side trip to visit the D-day sites in Normandy, so I spent a good bit of time over the last couple of months planning. I researched “Paris with Kids” and “Normandy with Kids” and read travel guides and blogs and travel articles. I checked TripAdvisor and Fodors and Rick Steves, I read Rick’s Paris section in our Rick Steves Europe book, and we even watched his travel video on Normandy. By the end of all the planning, I almost felt like I didn’t even need to take the trip because I knew so much about the area already.
It was going to be an aggressive trip. 3 1/2 days in Paris followed by 3 1/2 days in Normandy, spending each of 4 nights in a different location for the second half of our trip. Our Paris itinerary included the behemoth Louvre. Yet I really felt like I had left us some downtime; in Paris we had just one “major” activity each day, with some other optional afternoon activities. In Normandy there were beaches and other large expanses of outside space for the kids to romp in. But it seems that for one reason or another every activity ran long, every day ran late, every night we were late to bed, every morning we were rushing to get going early. We are all seasoned travelers and can pack our days like this part of the time, but doing it every morning during the vacation was too much for us all to maintain our sunny dispositions.
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| Cows, the symbol of Normandy |
Part of the problem was the crowds in Paris. Berlin is a big city and can feel pretty crowded in certain places, and there can sometimes be long lines for major attractions. But it doesn’t hold a candle to Paris, even in late October! The lines we stood in were relatively manageable by Paris standards, but they were still time-consuming and the threat of crowds everywhere caused us to try to hit every attraction either at the earliest possible time or at some extremely unpopular time. Paris transit is also not as easily navigable as Berlin’s. The metro stations were pretty convenient to where we stayed, but the Paris metro is a huge underground world. In Berlin once you go underground to the train station the trains are usually immediately accessible after your walk down the stairs. But in Paris you disappear underground and can navigate the corridors for 5, 10, 15 minutes before you ever arrive at the platform for your train. This added time and confusion to our transit times, and sometimes caused us to choose to just walk to our destination rather than to descend into the underground maze. As for busyness in Normandy, there was just so much to see. We like to take our time, Dan likes to take lots of photos, and I like to read all the signposts. So we finished each day kind of late, had a late dinner, got a short night of sleep, and then headed out again early each morning.
We are definitely feeling like we need a vacation after our vacation, but on the bright side there were many highlights of the trip.
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| Crepe with chicken, potatoes, bacon and chives (and a cup of local Normandy hard apple cider to drink) |
- French pastries - super yum! I prefer them over German pastries. My favorite was the pastry filled with almond paste and dusted with powdered sugar. The kids were partial to the chocolate pastries. There were also melt-in-your-mouth beignets filled with raspberry jam, or just with a little sugar.
- Crepes and gallettes - We had many meals of these. Savory crepes with ham and cheese and egg, or sweet crepes with nutella or strawberries or simply with delicious Normandy butter and sugar. Galettes, we learned, are buckwheat pancakes that are wrapped around various tasty things. My favorite was bacon and potatoes and some yummy French cheese, but we also tried the local sausage and some cheesy ham thing.
- Baguettes - are you sensing a theme here? The food was so good. The baguettes were a perfect crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, and the French butter is to die for. Haley was in heaven with a ham and butter sandwich on a baguette, which she ate over and over throughout the trip.
- Time with friends - the Rosarios: Efrain, Tina and Mia, were the most gracious of hosts. (Efrain has been a friend for many years and was a groomsman in our wedding.) They housed us and cooked for us and showed us around and let Haley play endlessly with their rabbits and generously provided us with eclairs and pastries, not to mention saving us a month’s salary on hotel costs. Thank you Rosarios! Tina cooked us coq au vin one night, and Efrain made our favorite, spaghetti carbonara, one night and French toast with brioche one morning. Haley enjoyed playing with Mia, who is two years younger, and got to sleep in the bottom bunk of Mia’s cool bunk bed!
Haley with the Rosarios' bunnies, Oreo and Shadow
Even with the hectic pace, most of our activities were really fun and memorable as well. Here’s what we did on the trip.
We arrived Saturday evening and since the Rosarios were at a Halloween party, we went out to a pizza place for dinner. The pizza was good and plentiful, but the price tag was shocking! This was our first indication of how expensive Paris was going to be. Over the coming days we found that entrees at the very cheapest sit-down restaurant were 12-15 euros, and most places were much more. Glasses of wine and beer cost about twice as much as in Berlin, and there is no such thing as a cheap appetizer or dessert. The one positive was that Paris restaurants, unlike Berlin restaurants, will bring you a free pitcher of tap water!
Sunday morning was what turned out to be our one and only somewhat leisurely morning. I had booked us on a Fat Tire bike tour which started at 11, so we had a little extra time for sleep and breakfast. We all enjoyed the bike tour and would recommend it. Our guide was funny and very interesting and his stories, interspersed with some pleasant bike riding, made for an enjoyable half day. The only problem was that it was cold! Our biking pace was slow and we kept stopping for commentary, so there was no chance to get our body heat going. It was a cloudy windy day and after a couple of hours we had donned all the layers we had brought and were still shivering. We stopped in the Jardin de Tuilleries for an outdoor lunch, when we were all hoping instead for a nice toasty cafe somewhere. Thankfully digestion warmed us up a bit for the last part of the tour.
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| L'Arc de Triumph is enormous! |
At the end of the tour we met the Rosarios near the Eiffel Tower and the kids rode one of the several carousels in the area. Then we headed to the Arc d’Triumph where we encountered the first of what seemed to be a steady stream of logistical failures on our trip, despite my careful planning. After compiling the entrance fees for our list of attractions we planned to visit, I had determined that we should buy the Paris Museum Pass which provides “free” entrance to many attractions and supposedly allows you to skip the line in many of them. You can buy this pass online ahead of time but there’s a surcharge, and our experience in Croatia and Copenhagen was that you could walk into any tourist shop and buy passes like this, so it didn’t seem necessary to pay extra. We thought we could buy the pass at any attraction, or at the airport or even at some independent locations. (I did see a booth selling the passes at the airport but opted to skip it and just get it at the first museum we visited.) Mistake. The Arc d’Triumph had a slow-moving line of 100 or so people, but on top of that I didn’t see the Museum pass advertised among the ticket prices. Dan and the kids stood in line while I walked towards the front to investigate. I found an employee and asked if the passes were sold there. “Yes”, he said, “but they may not be selling them anymore today.” “What do you mean?” I asked. He cut through the line to the ticket booth, spoke with someone for a minute, and came back to me. “No, they’re not selling them anymore. They stop selling at 5.” It was 5:14. “You’re better off just getting your pass in the morning,” he told me. “Then you can use it all day. Right now it’s the end of the day and everything’s closing.” “Yes, but this is still open!” I protested. “This is all I want to use it for!” Disgusted, we got out of line. It seemed wasteful to pay for entrance that was included in the pass we would now have to buy the following day. But after further consideration, we decided that this might be our only chance to see this site and we might as well go through with it. So I got back in line, all the way back at the end of course. Half an hour or so later when I got to the front, I decided to play dumb and try to buy the Museum Pass. “No, we’re not selling them anymore today,” she told me. “Why not?” I asked. “Because most of the attractions are closing.” “But…this one isn’t closing.” It was a losing battle so I bought the single admission tickets.
Monday morning we planned to attack the Louvre first thing when it opened. Both my research and our bike tour guide had told us to avoid the long lines by the famous glass pyramid and instead go underground and enter through the underground mall. Problem #1 was that we were running a little late and arrived 15 or 20 minutes after the doors opened. The lines were pretty short by the pyramid but we laughed at those suckers and headed to the underground mall. Horror of horrors, it seems that the “secret” entrance wasn’t so secret anymore! Those lines were WAY longer than the ones aboveground. Maybe we weren’t at the right place? We aborted and slunk back upstairs and across the plaza to join the line at the main entrance which was now about twice as long as it had been before. Ugh. Then, it turns out that getting through that line was just the first phase of Louvre entry, the security check. Once inside we waited in one of the ticket lines, only to discover that they don’t sell the Museum pass at the ticket booths. The lady told me the passes were sold “inside” and she pointed to a door. I went through the door and saw several small booths and rooms, none of which immediately jumped out as selling tickets. After asking someone, I was finally directed into a tiny room behind a closed door. In the cramped space of the room were two desks, one of which had two chairs in front and two tourists were sitting there completing their transaction to buy their museum passes. It reminded me much more of making a transaction at my local bank than of buying tickets to a museum. They must not get much traffic in there. Shortly afterwards I emerged from the room with passes in hand and we waited in yet another line, this one short and for entrance into the actual museum.
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| Haley and me with Mona |
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| I love the folds of the beautiful cape worn by Empress Josephine in this painting by Jacques Louis David |
On the schedule for the afternoon was an activity that was meant to contrast with the intellectual nature of our morning: the Paris Sewer Tour. It sounds strange, but this tour was recommended by blogs I read and also by Rick Steves. Since our kids are fascinated with Les Miserables, in which the Paris sewers play a prominent role, I thought this would be a fun activity. Another place we were misinformed! We couldn’t wait to get out of the sewers.
It was like trying to tour a museum in a port-a-potty. We couldn’t concentrate on the signage because the stench was overpowering. The most interesting part of the tour was the historical part, which told the story of the growth of the city of Paris and how they ran into problems with sewage and drinking water and how they eventually solved those problems. But the display cases were on top of a large grate with a river of raw sewage flowing underneath! I think the story of the development of the Paris sewer system, which is the longest in the world, could have been really fascinating if it had been done differently, but as it was we would definitely not recommend this.
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| They actually sold stuffed rats in the sewer gift shop! |
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| Super thick hot chocolate in a small cup for a big price |
After the sewer tour we were ready for something fun. Efrain suggested we meet at Le Jardin d'Acclimatation, a park with some amusement park-type rides.
We had hot chocolate at the acclaimed Angelina tea salon and then set the kids free to ride some of the rides.
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| Carter flies high |
Then we headed home to meet the babysitter who was coming to watch the kids while the adults went out for dinner. The restaurant Efrain had chosen opened at 7:00 and didn’t take reservations, so our plan had been to arrive promptly at 7 or a little before. But once again it took us a little longer to get out of the house, and the traffic was terrible for our Uber ride, so we arrived around 7:20. The place was already packed without even room to stand and wait at the bar. We wandered around the area briefly to see if we should change plans, but in the end opted to go back and wait for a table. Two hours later we finally were seated! The food was very tasty, but tapas portions for big prices. We filled up on bread and cheese while we waited for the table!
To be continued...
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| Paris window shopping: animal shoes |
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