Paris Day 2 12/28/15

Posted on Dec 28, 2015 by jkozik in family, travel | 0 comments

We tried to go to the Louvre today, well at least we thought about it. But, we slept late and by the time we got there, the lines were more than two hours long. We promised ourselves to come back on Wednesday. Again, the weather was pretty good. The forecast was for a high in the low 50s.

So, we decided to start the day by taking a long walk West toward the L’Arc de Triomphe along the Champs Élysées. From the Louvre, we started by following Rue de Rivoli marking the beautiful golden statue of Jeanne d’Arc as the start of our walk. We zigzagged to Place Vendôme and L’église Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption de Passy and stopped for breakfast at the Le Musset café on rue de l’Échelle.

From there, we followed rue Saint-Honoré for awhile and then turned back to the Place de la Concorde. I was delighted that everyone wanted to jump on the ferris wheel, La Grande Roue de Paris. It was busy but the line turned out to be under 20 minutes and the ride was a lot of fun.

We continued our walk West now on the Champs Élysées. The Christmas market was very busy, featuring lots of food and shopping. After the market, we only stopped at one store on the main shopping boulevard, the Disney store. We were looking for Star Wars action figures. We then stopped for lunch at the Café Le Deauville. We had a full lunch there. It was good.

We walked to the L’Arc de Triomphe, we took pictures and then headed to our next destination, Montmartre. We took the metro to get there then we rode up to Basilique du Sacré Cœur on the funiculaire. It’s a few blocks away from the metro stop and a lot easier to ride up than to take the very long, very steep stairway.

Once up to Sacré Cœur, we took pictures of the church and the Paris cityscape. The church was very nice to tour inside, but no photos. The sun was set; it was late in the afternoon.

We were tired and happy to head back. We took a break at the hotel then walked over to the nearby LePetit Saint Benoit restaurant. To our surprise, the very nice, very local place did not accept credit cards. It was not a tourist destination, it had a local character. We loved the Beef bourguignon and they had great deserts! The people were nice to us. I wanted to go back to here for New Year’s Eve, but it was all booked.