Madrid to Paris

We got our boarding passes at the hotel last night.  We saw that the seat assignment numbers were different than what we had chosen.  We had paid ahead so that we could choose our seats.  They had been all together at the front of the plane.  At least we were 2 and 2 but we were at the very back of the plane.  The flight was stressful  they could not find places for all of our luggage.  I could not believe that the plane started taxiing before we even had the luggage stored. They do not have any complimentary services on Iberia.  We had bought lunch stuff in the airport before we left.  Once we landed in Paris we headed out from baggage claim to meet our Victor cab.  We had arranged ahead of time to be picked up.  But another snafu.  They went to Charles de Gaule and we came in at Orly.  So we grabbed another shuttle service.  I was not happy.  Oh well.  We did get to our very cute apartment on the left bank.  Lia met us.  She gave us the tour of the apartment and how to use all of the equipment.  I hope that we can remember.  We EACH had to pass the test of how to lock and unlock the apartment before she would leave.  We unpacked and started a load of laundry.  There are some quirky things with this apartment but I like it.  They were supposed to have separated the beds before we got here but that was not done.  So they did that while we were out.  Once we were organized we headed out to go to the Concorde.  The metro skipped the Concorde stop.  Argh. Recalculating!  plan C or on we on plan D now.  We got off at the next stop and walked back to the Place de la Concorde.  I guess there was some political thing which had just happened so we had to change a few things.

But we managed

walked through the Tuilleries Garden

the arch de triomphe

the Louvre 

this shows the actual time we were at the Louvre

Since they can't put locks on the bridge any more they are finding other places to put locks.

one of the bouquinistes 

point zero in front of Notre Dame.  It was over 90 degrees and we were HOT!!!!! But we were troopers.  It was very pretty.

Notre Dame

5 miles later we got to Cafe le Flore en I'lle for our sit down break.  Whew.  I barely made it.  Jeanne had her ice cream.  Berthillion is famous around here.  She had coconut and chocolate. The rest of us had beer.

That sure hit the spot.  We regrouped and changed our evening plan. 

flying buttress 

We caught a taxi to take us close to our apartment.  We stopped at a Monoprix to do some grocery shopping.  We bought dinner fixings, wine and breakfast stuff.  Back to the apartment and whew .... time to relax and cool down.  The apartment has AC!!!  We may have to rethink some of our future schedule.