Monday, July 6

Anyone who has made it this far into our trip to France may be able to guess what is on today’s agenda. If you’re tempted to skip to the next entry – wait. I’m going to bore you with so much more than just another church and another museum. Lots of photos this time.

Our day wasn’t planned, other than wanting to visit Notre Dame. Otherwise, we made it up as we went.

Although planned, our visit to Notre Dame wasn’t well planned. You can go online and make reservations to visit Notre Dame, so that’s what we did. However, they were all sold out. They allow as many as 15,000 reservations a day, yet between 30 and 35,000 people pass through the doors every day. Since less than half the visitors have reservations, we figured we’d get in, but expected we might have to wait in a long queue.

Every large city these days has a homeless population. Small towns and villages may also have unhoused people, but I haven’t noticed any in any of the places we visited in Normandy. No doubt, residents of Denver know where the homeless tend to congregate, and if tourists don’t travel through those areas, they’d be invisible. The same, I’m sure, is true of all other cities. On our walk from the Metro station to Notre Dame, we walked through one of those areas. It struck me as a bit incongruous to find what looked like semi-permanent accommodations for the unhoused just a block away from Notre Dame in one direction and a few blocks from the Louvre in another. I didn’t expect it.

Anyway, we walked up to Notre Dame at 8:15 to find no line at all.

We could only wander through a small part of the church. We’re not sure if that was because that’s as much as can be visited now, or if it was because we got there during a service. If this had been my first visit to a Gothic cathedral, I’d probably have been disappointed. Having been inside a few now, perhaps I’m getting jaded. It’s a beautiful building and an impressive feat of engineering for its time. But is its fame due to it being above the rest, or is it just because it’s famous? I wonder if I was more impressed with the St Michael & St Gudula Cathedral in Brussels because it’s more impressive, or because I saw it first.

Even though Notre Dame is open, it is still being renovated after the fire. There is still quite a bit of scaffolding on its south side, a crane hovers over it, and there are shipping containers stacked up next to it. When we first walked in, I thought I caught a strong, momentary whiff of smoke, but that may be my imagination.

Fifteen minutes after walking in, we walked out.

We hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, so finding a boulangerie was next. This is not a difficult task. What’s difficult is choosing exactly how to bust the diet. I picked a deadly-looking pastry covered with raspberries. I had these in Brussels last year, but today’s had more raspberries. If it’s covered in raspberries, it’s gotta be healthy, right? Right?

Now we had to settle on our next tourist destination. Genae was in France for a few weeks in high school and had already been to the Eiffel Tower. Initially, she wasn’t too keen on going again, but it didn’t take much effort on my part to get her to go, so we hopped back on the Metro.

We were thinking that, because we hadn’t planned and thus hadn’t bought tickets, we wouldn’t be able to ride the elevator up. Genae certainly wasn’t going to take the stairs. Again, we were pleasantly surprised that planning wasn’t required. We took the elevator up, wandered around a bit, took in the views, and wondered repeatedly, “What building is that?” before taking the stairs down to the next level. It’s theoretically possible to climb to the summit, but it’s closed. I don’t know if that’s temporary or not. The lower level is full of trinket shops and restaurants.

On our trip down the stairs, we spotted a group of engineers with hard hats and binoculars inspecting the structure. I also noticed that the stairs going up are more worn than the stairs going down (walking on the right side, that is). I’d have guessed it would be the other way around. Don’t more visitors walk down than up?

Back on terra firma at 11:15, it was again time to figure out our next stop. While up in the tower, we saw the cruise boats on the Seine. Why don’t we take a cruise? Google Maps has some unexpected behavior. When we asked it to direct us to a cruise company, it said we could go 4.2 miles to find one. When I searched “night cruise”, it said one was a bit over a mile away. Instead, we crossed the street west of the tower and bought tickets for the boats right at the foot of the tower. With departures every thirty minutes, and, again, with no pre-purchased reservations, we walked up, bought tickets, and after a five-minute wait, boarded a boat.

The boat goes up the river, turns around above the Île de la Cité, then turns around to go back down the river on the other side of the two islands. The kids’ thing with moving the hands up and down, palms up, and saying “six seven” is still big here, it seems, as somebody did it on every bridge we sailed under. I still don’t get it.

There are 37 bridges over the Seine in Paris. All have names that are somewhat more poetic or informative than, say, “23rd Street Bridge”. I snapped pics of all that we sailed beneath, but two in particular caught my attention. The first was Pont Alexandre III, completed in 1900. It is named after the Russian tsar, and his son, Nicholas II, laid the foundation stone. The bridge is widely regarded as the most ornate, extravagant bridge in the city and has been classified as a French monument historique since 1975.

The other one that caught my eye was the Pont Neuf. That means “new bridge”. It’s an ironic name, though, as it’s the oldest standing bridge in the city. Construction was completed in 1607. When we passed under it, I wasn’t sure which bridge it is. It’s currently wrapped with part of a large art installation. The temporary inflatable piece, known as La Caverne du Pont Neuf, was initially due to open in June, but the vast trompe l’oeil canvas was torn during a recent storm.

As I have lived most of my life in Colorado, where we have no navigable waterways, I was a bit surprised to see cargo barges on the Seine. When I think of river cargo, I think of the Mississippi, or Missouri, or Ohio Rivers and the giant barges. The Seine isn’t very big compared to those rivers, and it has all these old, ornate, low bridges. Nonetheless, there’s a fair amount of barge traffic on the Seine, including container ships and bulk cargo. Cities were built on rivers because of transportation. Why shouldn’t that still be true, Dave?

I had a short conversation with the guy seated next to me. He’s visiting from Melbourne. More precisely, he’s visiting London. He and his family were here in Paris for the day – they woke up in London and will go back to sleep in London. That makes for a short visit to Paris. Talk about a whirlwind tour.

Now that it’s one o’clock, it’s time for lunch. We decided to grab some ham and cheese baguettes and eat in the park at the foot of the tower.

While noshing on our tasty sandwiches, we asked ourselves two questions. First, facetiously, could we see all the sights in Paris in one day, and, second, seriously, what’s next on the hit parade?

How did tourists do the tourist thing before the internet? Okay, sure, they planned ahead, unlike me. A few minutes of searching resulted in some interesting possibilities. Unfortunately, the first two that we selected, the Catacombs and the Musée d’Orsay, were no-goes as it’s Monday and they’re closed. I couldn’t ver well subject Genae to another military museum, so I let her decide. The heat of the day had set in (Paris is undergoing another heat wave), so someplace air-conditioned was required. She quickly decided we should check out the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle.

So, after another trip on the Metro and a short walk, we found ourselves at the front door. The first thing we noticed is that the line for people without tickets is closed. Uh oh. Did our lack of planning send us on a wasted trip? When we asked, we were told to buy tickets online. This took about two minutes, and two minutes more got us into the air-conditioning.

I was quite impressed. The grand gallery is essentially a giant atrium. The floor of the atrium is filled with all the animals one would find in the African savannah. The walkways on each floor that go around the atrium had exhibits covering a variety of topics includig moths, moose, and what Paris looked like before it was Paris. The exhibits are cleverly done, and even though this museum didn’t have English text on any of the descriptive signs, we didn’t feel short-changed. A couple of times while we were there, the lights flashed and thunder boomed, simulating a storm (without precipitation, of course).

Done with the museum, we were pretty much running on empty. The temperature was 94 and my Fitbit said I’d walked over 16,000 steps already. So we headed back to the hotel.

By now we’d become fairly competent at getting around on the Metro. We’d ridden on half a dozen different lines and used nearly twice as many stations. We’d ridden on three distinct wintages of trains: one where you had to open the doors by flicking a handle, one by pusing a button, and one where the doors opened automatically. We’d been in ancient stations and (seemingly) grand new ones. The last thing we learned was how to add fares to your Navigo cards. A friendly young Parisienne gave us a lesson. That stereotype about the French being snotty to tourists? Not at all true in our experience. Everyone had been friendly.

We grabbed some carry-out for dinner and ate in our room. We also managed a minimal amount of planning: we stopped at a boulangerie and bought tomorrow’s breakfast. Somehow, then, we have defininte plans for tomorrow. We’re going to the Palace of Versailles and already have tickets.