Our family suffered a few blows in the last year losing several loved ones over a short time period. This circumstance made us particularly sensitive to the fact that none of us are going to be around forever. With this in mind, my mom and I decided that there was no time like the present for her first trip to Europe, with me as her personal travel guide. I picked Paris as the destination. To me, there is no more quintessentially European city. Since I was leading the way, it didn’t hurt that I’d been to Paris several times in the past and could speak passable tourist-French.
In the past, my trips to Paris had been with my husband or friends. These past trips were busy, if not frenetic, seeing as many of the sites as possible in the short time we had. I loved the city; the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, and of course, the Eiffel Tower. I took pride in the fact that we would take the Metro everywhere.
This trip was different. Mom is beyond the point in her life where she wanted to be dragged through Paris checking off the site on a list and moving on to the next. She wanted to “experience” Paris. This experience did not include her trudging up and down the Metro steps, especially given the less than cooperative Paris weather, which was cold and rainy during our late May visit. (I believe her exact words were “the Metro is hideous” after a particularly harrowing trip up and down several flights of stairs and jumping over a small lake at the bottom of the St. Michel stop’s steps.) The question then became, what now? Taxis were prohibitively expensive to rely on for the entire trip; walking long distances was out of the question this trip with mom’s new hip; and city buses required a lot of transfers that, quite frankly, I didn’t feel like navigating. As we came up from the tunnel to the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysee, there it was- big, red, double-decked and, most importantly, dry and warm.
Karmic message received: the hop on, hop off two day bus pass was purchased and off we went. To my surprise, I was a convert. We took the Les Cars Rouge tour, which is included as part of a Paris Museum Pass. (If you don’t have the Paris Pass, buy your tickets online for a discount.) There are also several other similar tours. These busses circle the city stopping at the Eiffel Tower (both on the Seine and the Champs de Mars end), the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, Notre Dame, Musee d’Orsay, Grand Palais, Trocadero (for an awesome view of the Eiffel Tower) and the Opera. It offered a respite from the rainy weather, and was incredibly convenient to our apartment, just a block from Notre Dame. Did I mention that the Opera stop is also across the street from the unbelievable three-building Galleries Lafayette department store? The downside definitely was that it was by no means a fast way to traverse the city as it often was stuck in traffic, and the prerecorded tourcommentary wasn’t all that informative. But it was warm and dry and a good way to see the “highlights” if you were not in a hurry to get anywhere, and offered an alternative to the Metro if youwant to see the city while travelling from place to place. (As a side note, my kids thought the earbuds provided for the tour narration were a cool “souvenir” from mom’s and grandma’s trip. Who would have thought!?)
What was becoming of me? A bus tour? What next, a guided tour? Paying double for my drink by sitting at a café? Quelle horreur! Stay turned to https://favoriteplacetravel.com for part 2 of our Paris adventure to find out. (Spoiler alert: We did both, and loved it!) To book your trip, contact your travel agent at sgross@favoriteplacetravel.com or sglover@favoriteplacetravel.com or call Stacey at 404.409.4174, or Susan at 708.479.4693.