Sabbatical Blog: 9/5 Paris, France

9/5 Paris, France
We arrived! And made it through customs easily, not even a question of how long we plan to stay. On the plane they gave us landing cards… but I have no idea what I was supposed to do with them. No one asked for them, not even the customs agent?

We got our luggage rather quickly which was nice. Charles De Gaulle even has free luggage carts. Which is also nice! Then we made our way to the Taxi stand, which had a long line of people. The good news is that it was a fast moving line. And with our Bonne Chance (Good Luck) we got a mini-van Taxi. We have too much luggage to fit in a typical European taxi. It cost us 60 Euros to get to the hotel (about $90). It’s spendy, but when you’re tired it’s not worth dealing with the train and having to change trains. We’re staying at the Le Meridien Montparnasse, which is at the South End of Central Paris.

The upgraded room they put us in was a “classique” room. Tiny by American standards. It was a tight squeeze for all our stuff, but we managed with a little furniture re-arrangmet.

We hibernated a bit to refresh, since we didn’t get much sleep on the flight. Traci with 0 hours sleep since she was concerned about Kylie getting awoken from all the commotion on the plane. I managed to squeeze in almost 2 hours.

So now by 4PM we finally ventured out… hungry. There were many food options, but nothing seemed kid friendly. Especially with Kylie not getting much sleep, we didn’t feel like dealing with her in a restaurant, so we headed back to the Hotel and ordered the TV dinner (29 Euros each). This was a steak, fries, salad, and Salmon and more salad. It was a very good meal, especially when you were as hungry as we are. After getting some food in our bellies we ventured out again, and got a feel for our neighborhood. We found the local Starbucks, I picked up my Paris Mug, and had a cappuccino. It was by far the best Starbucks cappuccino I’ve ever had. Most places in the US can’t make a decent cappuccino except for specialty restaurants. We wandered around some more, and headed back to the hotel and tried to rest up for tomorrow.

Bonjour and Welcome to Paris.


Here we are in the Taxi stand Queue.


Kylie playing with the phone in the room.


Our First meal in Paris... Room Service.


This was the view from our first room, the Classique. It was on an upper floor, but was drastically small for us.