Before we headed out we skyped with my Mom quickly to let her know that Dad had gotten to London okay, and to open up a surprise care package they had packed for me!
My Mom and Dad had packed peanut butter, Tastykakes, and Philly pretzels for me!
After eating lunch, he had his first tradition English pie, at a pub down the road, we headed for the London St. Pancras train station via the tube.
Once we got to the train station we picked up our tickets and went through security and border control. We had about an hour before our train was scheduled to leave so we found two seats in the lounge, got two coffees and waited. Eventually they posted the platform number of our train and within minutes we were on the train, in our seats and on our way to Paris!
We took the Eurostar Chunnel with is about a three hour ride from London to Paris. I had read that the event of going under the English Channel was anything but exciting, which was exactly right. If it wasn't announce we would have never known that we were anywhere near the channel.
The entire ride from London to Paris looked like this, except for the twenty minutes that we were below the English Channel.
Since Dad was exhausted, he had been away for almost 30 hours by then, I read up on and planned out our next fours days, and of course kept my camera ready if anything exciting happened from our window.
Eventually we arrived in Paris, and started off on the task of finding our hotel.
I'll admit that it was strange traveling only three hours and have suddenly have a difficult time getting around. The language barrier was obvious as soon as we got there. I haven't felt like I am in a foreign country at all this summer because there is only a cultural barrier, not a language barrier, in the UK. Eventually after a few transfers, and many sets of stairs, we made it to our hotel.
Using the Metro in Paris made me appreciate the London Underground and how well it is laid out. The Paris Metro is modeled after the London Underground but I felt like the lines were not situated throughout the city properly. It seemed like the lines were added one on top of another over time without consideration of the number of transfers it would take to get from one major destination to another.
We were both extremely hungry by then so we dropped of our bags and headed a few streets over to find some place to eat. We settled on Cafe Central. Dinner was simple, nothing to Parisian.
Whenever we ordered Coke we would get glass bottled Coke, however the bottles were never the exact same shape, size, or weight the entire weekend.
During dinner we were discussing my Grandmom Millie, since that day would have been her birthday. I mentioned that should would have loved my dinner, Eggs Benedict, because she really liked poached eggs. Dad and I both laughed about how particular she was about how her gets were cooked and the funny faces she would make if they were just slightly off. Then he said, "She would have been very proud of you." Almost instantly a very familiar song came on over the stereo system, Louis Armstrong's What A Wonderful World. We both smiled and laughed, because that song was part of the remembrance video shown for my grandparents funeral and we both knew it was Grandmom Millie's way of agreeing with Dad and letting us know that she is okay and watching over us.
After dinner we took a walk to stretch our legs and look what we found!
Our hotel was a 15 minute walk from the Champ de Mars. We were there long enough to realize that we were really in Paris and to revile in how amazing it looked at night. However we were both exhausted and we know that the next few days were going to be tiring as well so we headed back to the hotel to get some sleep.
If you want to see more pictures from the first day of Paris, click here.
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