Paris, the City of ... Bikes?

Since we left Versailles a little earlier than we planned, we decided that we had time to try and go to our hotel before we hooked up with the bicycle tour that we had planned for that night. We decided to take the RER C train over to Notre Dame and walk down to our hotel. Well, this took a bit longer than we expected, so when we got off the train, we were pretty close on time. Plus, we weren't 100% sure where the hotel actually was, so we wandered to the closest area that we knew, then asked around. It turns out that we were pretty close. We got to our hotel, the Hotel Du Globe. We had the front desk call us a cab while we ditched our luggage in the room and ran next door to see about something to drink and maybe some supper (it's a 4 hour trip and no stops for supper, so you were supposed to eat before.) The meeting point was at the South Pillar of the Eiffel Tower. We got there with 10 minutes to spare and met up with the guide. He said that they normally wait around a little extra, so we ran over to one of the stands and split a jambon au fromage baguette (it was just a ham and cheese sandwich, it just sounds a whole lot fancier in French, don't you think?)


Tami and me getting ready to ride out


While we were waiting, one of the other tourists asked if we had been to Georgia. Since it was Game Day, I had worn one of my UGA shirts to show solidarity. I also thought it would be fun to see if anyone commented on it, but imagine my shock that the only person who did was from Australia. While we waited, we talked with her a little more. It turns out that she had a friend who played basketball for UGA and had visited Athens awhile back. She was taking 6 months to tour the world with four other friends and had been to many different places, including going back to Athens. It was interesting to hear about everywhere that she had been and get some tips of good places to go in Europe. Also, we could tell our tour guide was from the States and it turns out that he was from Madison, Wisconsin.

Anyway, we walked over to the HQ of Fat Tire Bike Tours and got our bikes. We then took a 20 minute ride over to Notre Dame, passing through the Latin Quarter. We stopped at Notre Dame for pictures and to hear a little bit about it. After that, we went across the bridge and had ice cream from a little place that makes their own daily and is only available on the one island. While we finished our ice cream, we got a little more history of Paris as well as interesting stories about the current mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë. The most interesting was that during a big party at the Hotel de Ville which was open to everyone, he was stabbed while mingling with the crowd. Before he was taken to the hospital, he insisted that the party should continue since it was in honor of the people of France. That takes class.


Tami and me at Notre Dame


Riding at night.... and those are reflective vests, we weren't really lit up like Christmas trees.

We hit the road again and went by Conciergerie, which is where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned for 72 days before she was executed. We heard a lot of fascinating stuff about that before we headed over to the Pont des Arts, which is the bridge that connects the Academie Française and the Louvre across the Seine River. It is a really nice wooden planked, wrought iron, pedestrian bridge where a scene from the last episode of Sex and the City was filmed. It's a popular spot with students for picnics and there were many out there when we passed by, we had to walk the bikes across to make sure we didn't run into people. Then we got to the coolest part of the tour where we got to ride around the courtyard of the Louvre, we even did laps around the big fountain. It was really nice seeing everything lit up and fun to ride around in the area seeing everything.


Tami and me at the Louvre

Then we headed up to the Place de la Concorde, which is where many people, including Marie Antoinette, were executed. Now it is a really beautiful area with a large obelisk in the center. We then went up closer to the Eiffel Tower and parked the bikes to get onto the boat for our evening cruise up the Seine river. The boating company that we were on was called the Bateaux Mouches, and our bike group all sat together. The tour included wine, so we all had a toast. The area we were sitting in wasn't too great, so our guide suggested that we move towards the front of the boat and a few of us did. We were smart and stayed close to our Tour Guide, Adam since he had the bottles of wine. We were glad we did though because we got to talk with him and with a couple of people on the tour who were very interesting. One was the Aussie who knew about UGA, whose name was Jacqui. Another girl, Holly, was originally from Australia also, but was now living in London. Holly's father, Jim, was there also and he lived in Australia, but was originally from Rhode Island. We hung out with them, drank a lot of wine and saw the sights. This tour went further down the river than the one we had taken back in February, so we were able to see the Mini Me Statue of Liberty. We even got a "Full Monty" routine and mooned a couple of times by some guys hanging out on the side of the river (don't worry, we didn't take any pictures, so this blog will stay PG... or at least PG 13.)


The Place de la Concorde - which shows the obelisk and has the Eiffel Tower in the background.

When we got back, we collected the bikes and rode back to the Fat Tires Bike Tours Office to return the bikes. We hung out at the office for a little while and talked to one of the guys in the office who was from Texas and was an Aggies fan, so Tami bonded with him. It turns out, the whole operation is run out of Austin Texas and is setup specifically for English speaking tourists. Most of the tour guides are from the US, mostly from Texas.

We ended up going out with Jacqui and Adam for drinks afterwards and ended up meeting up with a few other of Adam's fellow tour guides at an Irish pub that was fairly close to our hotel. We ended up leaving around 2:20 am to head over to our hotel, which was about 10 minutes away. By this point, we had been going since 3:30am, so we were exhausted. It was not hard to get to sleep that night.