Paris 11 May - 13 May

Wednesday 11 May
The day we left England. We woke up earlish in order to get to our train on time that departed at 8am. We had breakfast and walked to the station all inside 30 minutes.... Amazing!

We said goodbye to our hostess/waitress from Lithuania. While explaining to her we were going to France she seemed to not understand a word we said. She spoke about 4 phrases we figured, including "good morning, tea or coffee?, English breakfast? And goodbye".

Getting to the station was easy. However a security check is done before you get on the train so we had to go through that. Dad had some magnetic balls (neo magnets) in his luggage which also gets scanned there, the airport doesn't seem to do this. These set off the scanner so dad had to pull all his luggage out. After figuring out that the neo magnets had set off the scanner, the security guard also pulled out an egg from dads bag. He looked at Dad questioningly. You can imagine his face when Dad grabbed it and dropped it on the desk. Now this egg had some special properties mainly being that it was rubber. This caused quite some amusement as the guard then picked it up and also dropped it but on the floor. He and dad then went scurrying around trying to find it:-)

The trip on the train was good. The novelty wore off pretty quickly that we were traveling at 300+kms per hour.
On the Eurostar

Upon arrival we encountered a rather untoward sight as a lady came up to us under the guise of being deaf and mute and asking for donations, for all purposes begging, as a security guard came up and abruptly ripped the paper out of her hands and sent her packing!! Perhaps she was trying to rob us?

Arrival in Paris


After a rude awakening at the train station we had another one when we figured out that there are few escalators in Paris!!! Luggage in these situations is no-good. Finally getting to the hotel we promptly fell asleep.

After being refreshed.... to some degree, we went off to the Eiffel tower and went all the way to the top! This was brilliant! Looks a lot worse from the ground up. Even met an Aussie up there. We again made some wonderful photos. What a fantastic view over Paris!

The hawkers below were unbelievable. I believe it would probably give Bali a run for its money in that area!
We then had dinner and it remained light outside till about 10pm!
Headed back to our hotel and crashed out.

Thursday 12 May

Thursday was a rather relaxing day where we did very little. We wrote our post cards, did some shopping at a lovely littles supermarket, skyped with the boys back home, and then we walked up the hill to find an ATM. The main thing of note was going to Sacre Couer de Mont Martre which was an old RC church. This was the church that didn't get bombed during the war and apparently had monks praying 24/7 the whole time and even now has a 24/7 schedule for praying. we walked through Place du Tertre where the artists sketch and paint all kinds - also portraits.
We walked down a very steep hill and found a post office to mail our cards and finally an ATM. The tube station nearby had us walking down many flights of stairs and we wondered how deep we were inside the earth. Anyhow we had a trip in the underground to Porte de St Cloud and found the office where we had to be the following day to rent our car. Coffee at McDonalds!! then back to our hotel. We had dinner right near the red light district called the Moulin Rouge. At least it makes a nice photo.
Coming back to the hotel we organized our breakfast and lunch for the following day and then watched some tv shows.


Friday 13 May
Friday we lugged our luggage from our hotel to the car rental place. Fortunately we had worked out a route that had escalators so this was not too bad this time. Having gotten our brand new car which had about 5kms on the clock we used our Tom Tom to navigate out of Paris and along the way to Switzerland.
We arrived in Switzerland at about 5pm so having left at about 9:30/10 this equated to about a 7 hour trip. Beautiful scenery along the way allowed us to not be bored. Our chalet was wonderful. Will had his own bedroom with a door that closed - luxury at last, and we had our own cooking facilities. Of course we had to go to the local supermarket and stock up on food for dinner and goodies. Behind the chalet the highest waterfall in Switzerland tumbled down th ecliff face. How beautiful. We could stand and watch it for ages. The ,mountain peaks were covered in snow and the valleys were beautiful and green, the ground covered in flowers. It reminded us of the story of Heidi. Will and mum went for a walk along the Lutchine River. Our valley had the White Lutchine, and the Grindlewald Valley had the Black Lutchine. Later we saw that the rivers indeed had different colours due to the rocks and soil in the bottem of the rivers. later they joined together to end up in the lakes near Interlaken. The water was freezing cold as result of the melting snow high on the mountains. We looked forward to our mountain trip the next day.
Having booked our trip up the Jungfrau we went early to bed as we were getting up at 5:45 the next morning.