Day 4: Paris

Today was our last full day in Paris, and we only had a couple of things booked. So, hopefully, we might be able to give ourselves a bit of a rest from all of the walking.

Experience tells me that muscle pain is normally bad on day +1, but it peaks on day +2 … and true to form, getting out of bed was even harder today.

Sigh 😕

But we can’t let sore legs get in the way of our last day exploring Paris.

We haven’t done a great deal of overseas travel since COVID shut everything down. We did a short (3 day) trip to Uluru before Christmas 2023, and we both got COVID.

Then we did a 2 week trip to Singapore and Thailand not long after I retired in May 2024, and I seem to recall having some tummy issues from the different water and food, despite being very careful to clean out teeth with bottled water.

So I’ve been waiting for the inevitable to happen while we have been here in Paris … yet somehow, we have both dodged a bullet.

Maybe there is something inherently therapeutic from eating croissants for breakfast every day?

So today we had two things planned – a visit to Saint Chapelle and the Conciergerie at 9.00am, and a dinner river cruise at 8.45pm.

8.45pm is a timeslot that I associate with getting into my pajamas, not starting dinner … but when in Rome … or when in Paris too, I guess …

I had no real expectations about Saint Chappelle other than the fact that MBW said it is a church with stained glass windows, and that people say it is worth doing.

So there are two things I can say here: I have seen stained glass in people’s front doors, but that doesn’t mean I’d pay money to go and see them. And secondly, I know of people – although nobody personally – who say you should have a colonic irrigation occasionally, but that doesn’t mean I have any desire to have one myself, or that I’d even enjoy it.

But I’m willing to keep an open mind.

Oh, an open mind about the stained glass windows, not the colonic irrigation … my mind is most definitely closed to that.

We had our normal ablutions and headed down for breakfast. Croissants, baguettes, coffee, yoghurt … same as the last 2 days, and hopefully again tomorrow.

I could get used to this.

Several months ago, my GP sent me for an ECG – long story short, she was checking to confirm that there was nothing wrong with my ticker, rather looking for something that was wrong with it. My father had an unusual heart condition, and my GP wanted to confirm I don’t have the same condition (… I don’t BTW. Hooray for me!)

But somewhere in conversation with my GP, I apparently used the words “chest” and “pain” in the same sentence, and that faux pas resulted in another visit to the cardiologist for a stress ECG – that’s the one where they wire you up and make you run on a treadmill until you collapse – and hopefully don’t need CPR (… I didn’t BTW. Horray again for me!!)

That test gave a result that seemed to concern the cardiologist (he said that the result was “equivocal” (ie ambiguous), so he sent me for yet another test where they inject you with contrast dye and look and see what happens. An angio-something-or-other.

It turns out that everything is working exactly as it should “for someone your age” (whatever that means), but in the final debrief, Dr Gus did caution me to “go easy on the croissants in France” but didn’t give any particular context about what exactly that meant.

But I digress. Where was I? … croissants, breakfast, stained glass, sore legs … OK.

Breakfast done, we got our stuff and headed out to Saint Chappelle.

A 9.00am entry was probably a little earlier than I’d have liked, but it turns out it was only about a 10 minute walk away. So off we went.

One of the problems I’ve noticed with Paris is that they haven’t done very well on the accessibility front. Cobblestoned streets that are very uneven, and buildings (and subways) that have lots of steps and no elevators is all a bit of a problem if you have problems walking … or even if every step you take hurts.

I suppose that when they built these things anywhere from 200-600 years ago, the thought of preplanning for elevators wasn’t a consideration.

MBW goes to an exercise class a couple of times each week, so she wasn’t suffering the effects of long-term slothful inactivity like I was.

Frankly, I was having trouble keeping up with her. And when we had to go down flights of stairs to get into a subway, it was a whole new experience in pain.

But we got to Saint Chappelle, and we queued up in the “I already have a ticket” queue, and waited for the doors to open so that we could go through the usual security checks.

I find it a bit perplexing that you’re subjected to the same – or greater – level of security screening to look at some stained glass windows as you are to get into an airport! And treated with the same suspicion.

For all of the painful walking and security screening, i have to say that the windows of this church were simply amazing. Photos of the building and the windows simply can’t give the perspective, or do it justice.

You can only spend so long looking at coloured glass windows before it was time for us to move on to the Conciergerie.

I had no idea what this building was about, but I learned that this was a significant building during the times of the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette was held here for some time before being executed, along with many other prisoners.

The building held the law courts, prison cells, and was also part of the aristocracy’s very luxurious home.

The history is quite astonishing, but the sheer size of the buildings is mind-boggling. The level of detail in the stonework and the way it has been constructed is amazing .. especially considering that much of it is hundreds of years old.

The thing that made the experience even more engaging was that you are handed a tablet (like an iPad) on entering, and as you wandered through the buildings, you scan these codes along the way. Then, holding the tablet up, you see the buildings and rooms as they are now, but you also get this augmented reality view so you also see the buildings as they would have been during the French Revolution, including sounds from that era.

History meets technology. Well done, Paris!!

We spent a very pleasant couple of hours there, and then we decided to go for a walk to the Louvre. Now, the last time that we were in Paris (>30 years ao) we visited the Louvre. For sure it is something that you have to do at least once in your lifetime, but – speaking candidly – my recollection was that it was all pretty underwhelming.

We had no real desire to do it again, but we did want to go and have a look at the glass pyramid, at the very least.

The Louvre is surrounded by this incredible building known as the Louvre Palace, parts of which are >900 years old.

The Palace is unbelievably large … it just goes on and on and on. There must be literally hundreds of rooms in the Palace, and why anyone needs a house that big is beyond me. I think that it was Mary Antoinette that said “if they (the peasants) have no bread then let them eat cake instead”, which just demonstrates how out of touch with reality they were.

It’s probably not surprising that they had a revolution and she lost her head at the guillotine.

According to the InterGoogle, the population of the world is something over 8 billion people … and I reckon that most of them were queued up to get in and see the Louvre. I guess that it was a nice sunny Sunday afternoon, but the place was just nuts.

It was now early afternoon and we hadn’t had lunch, so we loaded some value onto our Navigo Easy cards and played subway ninjas again. We headed off to some food markets that we have heard good things about.

Sadly, by the time we got there they were closing, so we caught the train back towards our Hotel and went to Bo&Mie (a patisserie) for lunch.

Paris has this really nifty system where you can open their app (like our Translink app) and rub your card (like our goCard) on the back of your phone, and it tells you how much value you have remaining on your card. You can also buy and load more credit directly from your phone to your card.

A light lunch, and back to the hotel for a bit of a rest and cleanup before dinner on Le Calife. This trip has a number of highlights for us, and a dinner cruise on Le Calife was one of them.

It wasn’t cheap – about 234 Euros, but it was a very pretty cruise up the Seinne eating some pretty fancy food, and watching many of the amazing Paris landmarks go by.

The only disappointing part about the meal was that it very noisy with kids and foreigners on board … seriously, why are there so many foreigners in Paris?

But still a nice way to spend our last night in Paris.

We docked around 11.00pm and walked the 10 minutes back to our hotel for bed.

Another great day in Paris!

Tomorrow we head off towards Norway and then Finland, hoping to see the Northern lights.

Stay tuned …

Ciao