A few weeks before my trip to London, I texted Shae and asked if she still wanted to do a day trip to Paris. She did, and so we bought pretty last minute Eurostar tickets to run away to Paris for a day. The day after I got to London, Shae and I hopped on a train at 5 am and left Kings Cross, arriving in Paris a couple of hours later. The train ride is only about two and a half hours, and we both had so much we wanted to do in Paris, even though both of us had been there before. With only 12 hours in Paris, we had packed our schedule full of spots we wanted to visit and got started right after stepping off the train.
After arriving at Gare du Nord, we took the metro down to the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, near the Eiffel Tower. This is the bridge from a scene in Inception. This scene from Parks and Rec is basically what Shae and I were like when we were there.
Look right from the Pont de Bir-Hakeim and you see the Eiffel Tower, just down the river.
After waking up at 4 am, we were starving by then, so we stopped for a quick breakfast before heading to the Eiffel Tower, which was just a short walk from the Pont de Bir-Hakeim.
For a better view of the Eiffel Tower, we crossed the Seine to the Place du Trocadéro. Luckily, it wasn't very crowded at all, so we had plenty of space to ourselves and few people getting in the way of our photos.
It was a surprisingly nice day for November and the sun was out, so we opted to skip the metro and walk along the Seine instead on our way to our first museum of the day.
We couldn't visit Paris without going to the Musée de l'Orangerie. The museum, home to eight panoramic pieces of Monet's series of water lilies, Les Nymphéas, is one of my absolute favorites. I had visited it during my trip to Paris last year, but Shae had never gone there and I wanted to stop by again.
We walked through the Jardin des Tuileries and the nearby streets.
Before getting lunch, we went to le Palais Royal. Again, we were lucky to find it relatively empty instead of crowded with people stopping for pictures like we were.
Finally, a stop for lunch. I would gladly subsist on croissants and hot chocolate.
Both of us have been to the Louvre before, so we didn't include it in our itinerary - although we would have gladly gone again, if we'd had time, but visiting the Louvre requires far more time than we had for this day trip. However, we did walk by it on our walk to the Musée d'Orsay.
Our second museum of the trip was the Musée d'Orsay. Sadly, we didn't have much time at the museum, and we spent a significant amount of it finding our way to the famous clock and then taking photos (and waiting to take photos). I wish we had had more time to really enjoy the museum and see everything, but we did hurry around seeing what we wanted to see most.
It was dark by the time we left the Musée d'Orsay. Our last stops were Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore across from Notre Dame (where you cannot take pictures of how wonderful it is), and dinner in the Latin Quarter, before hopping on the metro to make it on the train to go back to London.