Another pictureless day... Today was a day of driving, starting from Ulm around 9 am we arrived in Paris around 8 pm. We ran into bad traffic due to an accident in Strasbourg which caused us to take a bit of a detour. During the detour we stopped for lunch, which took 2 hours, partially because we couldn't seem to get them to give us a check so we could pay for lunch! Yet another time I was thankful that I could communicate these simple concepts in the native language in German-speaking countries.
After lunch David drove with Brian navigating and Paige in the back seat with the luggage. Brian got curious and pushed the button on the dash-board with a snow-flake symbol that Paige had said yesterday was the rear-window defogger, and COLD AIR began blowing out of the vents! The car had air conditioning while we were suffering in the heat all day yesterday and earlier today!!! We were obviously getting a bit punchy as we laughed about that for a good 10-15 minutes.
The theme for the rest of the afternoon/evening was "We're hemorrhaging franc" as we had to stop and pay tolls every hour or so. David thought it was well worth the money as the roads were well maintained and relatively free of heavy traffic... very nice!
We arrived in Paris and began to navigate the streets cautiously... David drove, and while the driving was somewhat nerve-wracking, it wasn't too much worse than driving in any big city in the USA, especially with Brian's excellent navigation. We got really close to our hotel by 8:30 pm, just in time for a heavy downpour to start. We stopped in a no-parking area and Brian got out with his broken umbrella to try and find the hotel. He returned shortly having successfully found it, and we drove around the loop we'd driven twice (three times?) before, taking a right instead of a left at the crucial spot, and unloaded our stuff at the hotel. Then Brian jumped back in and he and David followed signs to a nearby parking garage that was charging about $30/day, which we thought was pretty good, so we parked the car. Paige had checked us in when we got back, and we went up to our rooms momentarily before heading out into the city.
So we strolled (Brian hobbled :-) out into the city toward the Seine. (I think we have some pictures of this evening on our roll of 400 ISO film, perhaps we'll digitize some when we get it developed.) Our hotel was a short distance away, and before long we were headed toward a bridge over the river, only to be accosted by an elderly French woman who (as far as we could tell) was saying something along the lines of "You can't cross this bridge! You MUST cross that (pointing) bridge, it's MUCH prettier!" (repeat three times) so we followed her advice and she was right! We crossed on the pedestrian-only Pont des Arts which shot us straight into a courtyard of the Louvre. We strolled (Brian hobbled :-) up from the Louvre through the Jardin Des Tuileries, and up along the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe. Along the way we stopped at a French McDonald's knock-off for burgers and fries, since it was about midnight and David at least was very hungry!
We used the subway system (Paris Metro) to get home. We left the Arc de Triomphe around 1 am, and the city was still very much alive, but we were dead, so we headed back to the hotel for a good night's sleep.