Everyone is now at least halfway through their holiday today. Unfortunately everyone is still not healthy…..

Ross bounced out of bed feeling much better this morning, so decided to go to Villers-Bretonneux with Jarrod. Jarrod has been keen on reaching that destination since his ancestry research, and decided last night even if everyone was too unwell to join him, he was going to head out there alone.

He told everyone he would be in the lobby ready to leave at 8.30am, and was probably surprised when Tim, Cooper and Ross all joined him. Luke had gone to bed early feeling unwell and missed the message, but after sleeping 15 hours he felt better and caught a later train out to Amiens to join them.

I felt worse, so stayed in bed and texted everyone for roll call. We are in rooms of two, so I had to wait a while to get all replies! Jess wasn’t feeling great so decided to stay in, and Zac was worse than yesterday, so he stayed in bed. Abi and Belle went to get us breakfast (after 11am by the time we all got organised!), and brought me a coffee.

Beck felt very sorry for Ollie missing Disneyland – he and Belle have both expressed they were most looking forward on this trip to Disneyland Paris and climbing the Eiffel Tower. So she decided to brave the trains, the masses, the crowds, the lines, the people (all of which she LOVES….) to climb the Eiffel Tower, and was even braver to do it alone with Ollie and Belle!

Once Zac and I had eaten something and drugged up again, I checked on Jess by text, and told Abi, Tom and Sam they should get out and do something rather than just sit at the hotel to keep me company. So they ventured off on their own quest, and Zac, Jess and I slept.

All of that to say……today’s diary entry needs to be written by others because all I did was rest! So today there are guest spots from Beck, Abi and Jarrod about their day, which will be as informative for me as everyone else reading this!

From Beck:

After a well earned sleep in, Belle, Ollie and I hit the streets of Paris (on our own) for what we thought might be a shortish visit to the Eiffel Tower followed by another shortish trip to the apartment and restaurant that doubled as film sets for the TV show Emily in Paris. Well we were wrong about anything being shortish! There was nothing short about our adventures today!
We left the hotel about midday and stopped quickly for a chocolate pastry for Belle as she hadn’t had any breakfast yet.
We travelled the 22 stops from Nation train station to Bir-Hakeim station, where the Eiffel Tower is a 700 metre walk away. We bypassed all of the men trying to sell us light up Eiffel Towers and Berets on the street and passed through our first security checkpoint.
Once inside the gardens and esplanade we had to decide whether to join the line for tickets using the elevator up or the line for tickets to walk up. The kids were keen to walk up to the second level as they said it would “enhance their experience “. We swapped lines from the elevator one to the walking one until Aunty Nik text me and said the walk included 600 steps. I pulled rank on the kids and moved us back into the elevator line!!
We were in line for so long that I had to leave the kids in the line and go and get them some lunch (Belle had Nutella crepes and Ollie had a sugar crepe and I had a bag of crisps).
Once I rejoined the kids in line with their food, we waited for just over two hours to get to the front of the line to buy tickets. We decided to again “enhance our experience” and get the tickets that took us all the way to the top of the tower (280 metres up of the 330 metre tower). We rejoined another line to get through our second security checkpoint, where we rejoined another line to get the elevator to the second floor. Once we finally got to the second floor, we rejoined yet another line to get the elevator to the top level. All in all it took us close to three hours from the time we arrived there to the time we got to the top of the tower.
Once up the top we took lots of photos and decided the wait was worth it. Albeit really cold, we had great visibility and because we had taken so long to get to the top, by the time we got down to the bottom (after doing all of the lines for elevators in reverse) the tower was lit up and beautiful.
The rest of the family had decided to meet up at 6:30pm for dinner close to home, so the three of us finished up and walked back to the station where we began the 22 stop trek back to Nation.
We arrived back at the hotel at about 6:20pm, so our shortish trip to the Tower was much longer than anticipated and we never even got close to the Emily in Paris sets. Maybe that can be on tomorrow’s todo list…

From Jarrod:

Leading with a bit of context: Each ANZAC Day of late, I’ve spent a couple hours researching the military connections of our family history. This year I was fascinated to find two distinct strong connections to Villers-Bretonneux, a small commune on the Western Front that was the scene of many Australian involvements in crucial Allied victories of the First World War.

On Mum’s side, Nicole’s great-grandfather William “Bertie” Lidgard served in the 36th Battalion, which was involved in defending both Villers-Bretonneux and the main nearby town of Amiens from the German offensive in 1918. Upon returning to Bankstown and marrying his wife, he named the family home “Villers-Bret” after the town, and it remained as such for decades afterwards.

On Dad’s side, Ross and Luke’s great-grandfather Richard Jones served in the war, following the footsteps of his older brother Harry Jones, who had enlisted at the outbreak of WWI. Harry survived the Gallipoli landings as Wounded in Action, ascended to the rank of Corporal, but then was Killed in Action on the Western Front in France in July 1916. At the conclusion of the war, an Australian National Memorial was established at Villers-Bretonneux, and the names of all diggers who had perished nearby without a marked grave during the war were inscribed on the stone walls. Harry Jones was one of those thousands of names.

With connections on both sides, it was an honour to visit the main town of Amiens, and the memorial itself at Villers-Bretonneux, with Dad, Tim, Cooper and Luke.

Amiens was convenient to get to by train from Paris – we arrived at 10:30am, had breakfast at a cafe, then explored the Amiens Cathedral. We were blown away by the cathedral – an architectural marvel (taller than Westminster Abbey), very ornate (including Australian memorabilia), and incredibly impressive for the time, having been completed in 1270. Lines for the recently reopened Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris were quoted by Beck yesterday as the longest queue she’d ever seen for anything, and yet here only an hour’s train away stood a building not at all dissimilar in age and magnificence.

Travelling to the Australian National Memorial was trickier than anticipated (to our surprise, despite being only two train stops over on the regional line, this service was only operating every 3-4 hours, so we had to settle for two taxis), and sadly the two museums out there were both closed over the Christmas break. Nonetheless it was a privilege to visit, especially when on reflection, we may have been the first visitors to ever seek the name of Harry Jones (which we located on the wall), or perhaps even as descendants of William Lidgard. We also enjoyed that the very few people we encountered were also mostly Aussies (hearing “g’day mate” is refreshing after weeks away!).

From there, we walked through the town of Villers-Bretonneux itself, which was very quiet with almost nothing open (Sunday + Christmas break, we suspect). A pair of Ubers took us back to Amiens, and we rejoined the rest of the family in time for dinner back near our accommodation in Paris. All in all, a day we felt privileged to share 🙂

From Abi:

Sam and I began the day at 11:45am by touring the shops near the hotel for supplies. These consisted of fruit and Gatorade for Zac (which also turned into extra snacks and water for everyone else) from two different supermarkets, croissants for five of us from a nearby patisserie and a coffee for Mum. Once we had bought everything we went back up to our rooms to eat and formulate a plan for the afternoon, when we decided that Sam, Tom and I were really the only ones healthy enough to go exploring.

Just after 2pm we set out for the train station and travelled to Anvers before climbing a steep hill and a number of stairs to reach the Sacre-Coeur Basilica. At this point we were glad Mum hadn’t come with us, for fear her ankle would not have coped! Although we had great views of the city at the top, the crowds were huge and there was a long line snaking around the Basilica to enter it so we soon left in search of a souvenir shop for me to buy a postcard from. (Abi is collecting a postcard a day from every destination for every day of our trip).

Sam was intent on visiting the ‘Miraculous’ bakery, a small patisserie that inspired the design of a key location in the show Miraculous. Thankfully, it wasn’t too far from the Sacre-Coeur, so once we managed to escape the crowds we headed there to take some photos and buy some pastries. The three of us ended up sharing a small moelleux chocolate cake and a hazelnut cinnamon scroll, both of which were delicious!

From the patisserie Tom walked us to the hostel he stayed at last year when he visited Paris with friends, and we were then able to walk to the Moulin Rouge. Sam got a bit of a shock from all of the storefronts we walked past on the way, but everyone was happy to take some photos of the front of the Moulin Rouge and leave it at that. By this point it was 4pm and we had achieved everything we set out to see, so the three of us got on the metro and headed back to the hotel to help figure out dinner plans.

[Thankyou for your contributions, you three who are my GOATs today! I couldn’t have got through today without them!]

Everyone was home from their quests by soon after 6pm, so we looked for a local restaurant to have dinner together. Across the large roundabout from our hotel was one called Le Dalou that was willing to take a table of 14 without a reservation. We all enjoyed hearty healthy meals, and even better, they had an entree of 12 l’escargots which I ordered because one thing I wanted to do in France was make everyone eat a snail!

We then returned to our hotel to have a glass of champagne on the rooftop. Ross and Luke bought a bottle of French champagne at Aldi when we were in Bordeaux, and everyone has been too sick since to try it. So tonight was our opportunity, and the general consensus was that we do not like it as much as the choices in Australia! The view from the hotel rooftop is spectacular though. And now it is time to drug up and head back to bed!