Paris

Monday, July 18, 2016
Paris, Île-de-France, France
Today we got packed up and enjoyed breakfast as soon as it opened at 7AM. Desmond was really enthusiastic about a tiny cherry pie he found. Bryan ordered a ham and cheese omelet that looked good. I ate a bunch of fruit and some granola. We've really enjoyed the service here. They are friendly and accommodating.

When we got to the train station we were unable to purchase tickets for the 8:00AM train as we had hoped . In fact, all the trains heading to Paris were booked until much later in the morning, 10:40AM. The DB app is great, but apparently it does not tell you which trains are full. Oops! And the man who was helping us also told us the tickets cost more the longer you wait to buy them. So buying them the morning of cost us an extra $40 or so. Oops.

We bought them and the man told us we needed to get to the platform about a half an hour early. We understood this to be because of security measures at the international station. So, we found ourselves with some time on our hands. We hiked back up the hill, carrying the stroller up stairs, to get to the playground Desmond played in yesterday. He had a good time playing, but we left when a safety/maintenance crew came in to check the equipment and clean the playground up.

We walked back to the station and caught the next train we could for the little hop to the international station. Then we found some chairs and settled in to wait . Desmond watched some home video clips on my phone for a while, and rode the escalator up and down (with help, of course). Then we made our way up to the platform. There was what looked like a security check line with a sign that said we needed our ID and tickets out. We stopped and got them out. We walked a few more feet and there were the escalators up to the platform. Not sure whether there had been a checkpoint at that place at some time or what. Anyway, we went up to the platform and continued waiting. The reader board informed us the train was running 7 minutes late. Then 10. Finally 20. Eventually the train rolled in and we got on.

We ate PB&J on the train, much to Desmond's delight. The border police came by and checked our tickets and passports. Then we watched some videos together of stormtroopers dancing and so forth to pass the time. Desmond said, "I like Troopers." :) It wasn't a long train ride to Paris as the train was quite fast.

But then came the subway stations. With the stroller. And the stairs and escalators. And elevators that sometimes took us where we wanted and sometimes did not. One time the wooden floor of the elevator smelled of urine and it was poorly lit. The whole subway experience had me mentally rehearsing, "I do *not* hate Paris. I do not hate Paris..."

Then we had reached our station and needed to figure out which way to exit to be near our hotel . Historically, we have a worse than statistically reasonable percentage of correct guesses in this situation. In fact, we have yet to make the correct choice the first time we've come up out of any station on this trip. We made our best guess and carried the stroller up yet another flight of stairs. Bryan got the directions up on his phone map a moment later. "We went the wrong way." he informed me. "This is my surprised face," I responded, deadpan.

We had requested an early check in with our Platinum Elite status with Holiday Inn. We had hoped to be arriving around 10:45AM originally. We stepped up to the reception desk at 2PM instead. At only one hour early, the hotel was unable to accommodate our early check in request. Nor did they pretend to try very hard. We were dismissed quickly to sit in the lobby.

As we sat waiting we found on the website that check in time was 2PM. We had been waiting at this point for just over an hour and no one had summoned us or spoken to us again . We approached the counter and tried again. When we mentioned that we thought the check in time was supposed to be 2PM, she said "Yes, but the hotel was full last night and people, um, not checking out very promptly." No apology. Just an explanation.

Anyway, we finally got checked in to our rooms. We had time to change a dirty diaper and drop our bags off and then had to turn right around to go meet Bethie.

The subway trip that we expected to take a little over 20 minutes stretched into an hour. We changed where we were going to meet Bethie. She didn't see Paris because she was sitting around waiting for us. :( When we finally met up at the Musee d'Orsay to go look at Millet paintings, the museum was closed because it is Monday.

We asked Bethie what she would like to go do or see. She chose the Eiffel Tower. We walked in the heat over to the tower, telling Desmond he would get to run around in a park soon. We get to it, and the whole park area, that is usually filled with picnic-ers, was fenced off and some sort of construction or massive event set up was underway.

We gave up on Paris and started walking towards dinner. We got to Chipotle and ate a satisfying meal (in air-conditioning) and drank some water. We followed that with Häagen-Dazs ice cream. We left feeling much better.

We headed back to the hotel from there. I, for one, was more than happy to call this day over. Here's hoping tomorrow is much more "magical."

~ Merilee

We booked most of our trip before we booked our flight home. I ended up finding us a flight out of Paris, so that became our last stop. We didn't have many hotel points left at that point so our options were limited. I originally booked us a Holiday Inn Express in the Monte Marte neighborhood of Paris at 30,000 points per night. Then they had a points sale offering us the Holiday Inn we are at near Disneyland for just 5,000 points a night. We got a ton of points back even after booking a second room so Bethie could join us.

Seemed like a great deal at the time, but the service has been so poor we aren't as sure now. The rooms are nice though and it will be much more convenient to our Disneyland trip.

~ Bryan
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Comments

Andrea
2016-07-19

Aw man, rough day indeed! I hope Disney goes better!

2025-02-10

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