Sunday 20 December

We were allowed a sleep in this morning…until 7.30am! The coach left the hotel at 8.30am to do a driving tour of the centre of Paris and climb the Eiffel Tower before it opened to the public. This is the day Belle has been waiting for! (And I still had to coax her awake this morning…)

   
   
Being up on the second level was a great experience and just being able to be there was a highlight for the kids. From there we were taken to the Place de la Concorde, and left the group who were doing an optional extra tour of the Notre Dame cathedral. We had a Louvre tour in the afternoon which I had booked months ago, so our priority was getting back to the hotel for a rest time before venturing out again.

We braved the metro system to return to the hotel. I made the mistake when we crossed the border into France of telling the kids I had studied French for many years. But it was many years ago! Sam now brings me pamphlets, books, newspapers etc asking me to translate everything, and everyone expected me to be able to converse with the train station master fluently to find out the way back to the hotel 😬 but the French speak too quickly for me! I need time to analyse each sentence and guess the words I don’t know!

  
Anyway, I managed well enough to navigate the way back and we made it. We had to change lines at a certain station (St Lazare) though, and the maze we walked to find line 3 from line 12 was so long, I felt like we had walked halfway back! Once back in our room, Ross went to the supermarket next door and I enforced a midday rest time. 

The hotel is a 20 minute drive from the city centre, but once here, there is a cul de sac downstairs with a choice of five restaurants and a supermarket. Last night the majority of the tour group went to the Moulin Rouge, and we picked a restaurant downstairs called hippopotamus to eat in, and enjoyed very nice steak and salad meals (it was like a Black Stump restaurant). The service was slow, I guess being a Saturday night it was busy and the staff thought everyone was happy to take their time over their meal. With six very tired children around the table, we just wanted to eat and put everyone to bed! To no avail though, we arrived at the restaurant just before 8pm (waiting in our rooms for poor Ross to finish the washing) and weren’t finished until after 10pm.

We fed the kids sandwiches and wraps from the supermarket in our room and headed back into Paris by two taxis. (A maxi taxi only takes up to 7 people). We had two tours of the Louvre booked for 2pm, split by age group. The maximum in a group is 5 people. Ross and I had intended to divide and conquer, but on the first night of the tour a lovely young newlywed couple from Darwin sat with us (oh my, how OLD does that sentence make me sound?!?!) and we learned that they were not doing many of the extras available because of their tight budget. Ross had the brilliant idea to include them in our tours seeing as we were paying for them whether they had five or less participants, so Micah and Sarah took Jarrod, Tim and Abi on the three hour tour with a guide (who was from Melbourne!) and Ross and I and the little three were guided by Vanessa (from Boston) on a two hour tour. 

   
    
 Both tours ran 40 minutes overtime. There is just so much to see and experience and learn about there, and the guides were so good and patient with all of our questions. After our tour ended, I took the little three back to the hotel in a taxi to get ready for our Farewell Dinner, and Ross waited for the others. As the coach was leaving to take us to dinner at 6pm and the other tour didn’t finish until 5.40pm, the others decided to meet us straight at the restaurant. When they weren’t there by the scheduled time of 6.30pm, I started to worry and was wishing we had paid for working phones! But they arrived soon after – they had been told at the Louvre it was only a 20 minute walk, but because of crowds in areas like the Arc de Triomphe it took them an hour!

Dinner was a delicious three course meal, with choices such as French onion soup, snails (Ross, Jarrod and Tim ordered them so there were enough for everyone to try – yes even I tried one!), salmon, duck, creme brûlée and chocolate mousse. This was followed by a cruise down the Seine river and then a coach tour of Paris by night. The “city of lights” puts on an even more spectacular show at this time of year! It made for a very late night though – we weren’t back in our room until 11pm. 

   
    
 Some of the group are leaving the tour here rather than coming to London. The little kids were very sad about saying goodbye to people they didn’t know a week ago!! We have said for a couple of years now that after Europe we would start researching getting a dog, and we had considered a guide dog puppy that needs to be socialised and returned to then be allocated to a needy recipient. I am not sure now if that is a great idea based on the kids’ disappointment in having to say goodbyes! 😉