our family's travels through Europe
We’ve enjoyed more swimming, good food, beautiful scenery and stormy weather, and now our time in France is over.
We’re off again, on our way to Portugal now, with an overnight stop somewhere around the French/Spanish border. Goodbye Chevanceaux, it was fun!
So we started by being woken up at 7:00 AM. Then left at 8:00 ish for a 40 min drive to Angoulême, which is about 2 hours north of Bordeaux. We caught a train at Angoulême. A TGV to be exact. A train of great speed!!! Woooo Hooo!!! Max speed for a TGV is 517 kph!! Average is 300 kph! The train was 2 hours long to get to Montparnasse train station. After we got of the train we put our bags in a BagBNB ;P. We then walked to the Eiffel tower. then we got on a bus tour of paris that was shorter than normal because the road was blocked so they skipped a bit of it. We got off near the end of it to go up the Arc De Triomphe. It was really cool. There were 291 steps and we h– to go up and down them. When we got to the top of the Arc, a protest about climate change started. It really was like the police were doing a Yakety Sax. routine. Please watch. It is really funny. Beside us people were throwing a cloth poster off the edge of the Arc. Anyhoo, after the Arc we went to the Catacombs. WoOoOoO!?Ha! It really was a lot of walking then SHOOM!!!! BONES! 6 MILLION PEOPLES BONES!!!!!!!☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️WOW!!! Then we went to the hotel. Nothing special and literally a Budget hotel. I mean, the name was Ibis Budget. Buut the next day we started off going to the LOUVRE!!! WOOO HOOOO!!! I was pulling along to get to the Mona Lisa. I SAW IT and Mom got a picture with me in it. We saw the Winged Victory of Samathras(No head) Then I fell apart.?As in TALKED. A LOT. Then we looked at the Notre Dam on the way to a natural history museum :P:P:P (My choice) We then traveled to Munda lingwa, a language museum. After that we left Paris?. I will spare you the details. We had pizza and left.
This was an expensive & busy weekend. On the 12th and 13th of October we went to Paris. We got there on a TGV which went to Paris from Bordeaux and we caught it at Angoulême. For most of the journey it was traveling around 300kph. We left at 9:27AM and got there around noon. We got there and went to the Eiffel Tower. We walked around it once and waited for our bus tour. There were a LOT of people selling little model Eiffel towers, all the exact same. They came in, large, gold ,silver, blue, and rose gold, Medium, gold ,silver, blue, and rose gold, Small, gold ,silver, blue, and rose gold.
The bus tour was a disappointment, as it was stop and start traffic, it cut off a lot of our route, due to closed roads, the seats were cheap plastic, and the earbuds malfunctioned as often as not, When they did work, the info was rare and far between. We got off at the Arc de Triomphe and climbed the 291 steps (I counted) up to the top, and stared out across the city for a while, and looked down the Champs-élysées. As we were about to go down we saw a bunch of bike protesters and heard police sirens. A bunch of riot police then jumped out of their vans, (after going up the wrong side of the street and doing a U-turn into traffic then stopping on the Champs-élysées) and warded off the cyclists. Then the cyclists snuck up through smaller streets and came out farther up. Then a drumming band started up, also part of the protest. It was very entertaining, and we were watching it all when more police arrived and blocked traffic even more. A couple guys then came up next to us and threw a massive banner up and over the wall of the Arc de Triomphe, which promptly came back up at them. They tried again and again and it hung there. Then they started yelling “Extinction rebellion” and then some more cyclists had snuck up to the arc, and were yelling back. The police were then sick of it and came and evacuated the Arc, which we had just vacated. It was all very exciting.
We then walked to the nearest metro station and went to the area of the Catacombs. We waited a while and got some really good bread, and then got in line (the priority line is WORTH it. Otherwise we would have been in an hour long line, as it was we were first in line and got in the line only a quarter to 6, the time of our tour being 6). We got in and went down. First there were a few info boards, telling us that we were below the waterways and the metro and even the sewers. We walked for about half a kilometer I would say, through old quarry tunnels and then got the the entrance to the bony Catacombs. The sign above the entrance said,”STOP THIS IS THE KINGDOM OF DEATH”, it was supposed to deter any miners that stumbled upon the entrance. There was supposed to be 6 million skeletons here. They lined a tunnel about 1 kilometre long to my reckoning, and up to 20 meters deep and stretches up to 30 meters back. That is a LOT of bones. It was cool but not really cool and the hour down there was about as long as I would have wanted. Dinner was next and we found a really good and cheap Thai restaurant. Then we headed to the hotel and I found it nice and luxurious, but it was only 1 out of 5 stars for luxuriousness. (I wonder what 5/5 stars would be like?) Breakfast was nice, because Mom would never buy chocolate cereal, or practically infinite croissants. I also liked the coffee (and hot chocolate) machine.
Now day 2. Up at the crack of dawn, and down into Paris and into the Louvre at 9:30. We saw loads of Italian paintings including the Mona Lisa, and many others. Other pieces of note are The The Winged Victory of Samothrace, and The Venus de Milo.
Then we walked by Notre Dame, and talked about the burning. Then we went to a natural history museum. That was nice, but rather small and sparse then we went to a museum of languages and that was boring to me, (languages are not my thing). And that was it. We got on a metro, had pizza near the train station, and went on another TGV at 7:30.
A different kind of update — last weekend I ended up going to the emergency room. I’d been having a bit of tingling on one side of my face, just occasionally, but last Friday it was most of the day and Saturday it started to feel numb, so on the advice of the local pharmacist, we went to the nearest hospital. The staff were very nice, and quite concerned, and sent me in an ambulance to the bigger hospital in Angoulême, where within an hour I had an MRI. The good news is no stroke, no tumour, nothing urgent. They recommended that I see a neurologist at some point because it’s likely some weird nerve thing, but they stressed that it wasn’t urgent. I’ve felt it a bit over the last week, but not much. I guess I need to find a neurologist in Spain where our next long stay is planned.
The bright side of all this? I spoke more French that evening than most of the trip so far, and it was very good for my confidence!
Up early to get to the Louvre before it got busy. We spent 2.5 hours there, which was way longer than I expected the boys to last! We saw the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo and lots more, of course. But by then the crowds were getting insane, so we walked along the Seine, past Notre Dame, to the Galerie d’Evolution for an hour, then more walking to Munda Lingua, a small funky museum devoted to languages and linguistics. And that was it! Back to Montparnasse for a quick dinner and the TGV back home to Chevanceaux. All exhausted but we saw a lot of Paris!
Paris : Eiffel Tower (we just looked, didn’t go up) bus tour, Arc de Triomphe (we did go up, so many stairs!) and the Catacombs (we went down so many stairs!). At the Arc we were watching the crazy people queuing in the middle of the street for the perfect photo and the utter chaos of the traffic on the roundabout, when loads of police showed up, and protesters on bikes, and drummers, and then suddenly the people beside us were unfurling a banner from the top of the Arc! It was Extinction Rebellion. Interesting experience.
Lots of walking, now we’re all wrecked! But up in the morning and off to the Louvre.
We’re on our way to Paris…. at 300km/h!
Hi! I hope you are up for a report! On the 2/10/19 we went to La Rochelle Aquarium and it was amazing!! This is a report about what we saw, my favorite bits and also (The best part) Photos!!!
I will start at the start. To start with we walked through a tunnel of jellyfish. Next was a bunch of what I thought were Cuttlefish but Ben says no.
