Day by Day in Paris and Prague: Amanda Goes to Paris

We arrived in Paris on Thursday morning (4/29/10). After an uneventful direct flight from SLC airport to Charles Degul Airport. The flight was about 10 hours and surprisingly Amanda and I slept about 4 hours. So we arrived about 11am Paris time and checked into our hotel. We stayed the first night at the Hilton located near the airport and right next to the train station, which made it very convenient. Poor Brad with his sprained ankle, he took two severe spills on the uneven sidewalks as we left the train station, he had his little rolling scooter and it caught on the sidewalk twice and he was spilled out onto the ground. We checked in to our room and slept for about 3 or 4 hours. Then we headed into Paris to go on our night time tour down the Seine. The boat tour was fun and we saw some of the wonderful sights of Paris all lit up, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, several really beautiful bridges. We finished with a bus tour of night time Paris and ended the tour at the Champs D'Elysee. Amanda and I found some fun pastries to buy and then we decided to head back to the hotel, it was getting quite late. We went down to the subway and waited for our train but it never came. We began to read the small print on the schedule and the best we could decipher in french was that it didn't run past 11pm in the spring. So we sort of panicked and headed up stairs to try to find a bus or a taxi or some other way home. I poked my head out of the train station and was looking for the bus and was approached by a man who acted like he was trying to help me but we were soon surrounded by his friends and we all made a hasty retreat back into the train station. Scarey! We asked an employee and they assured us that our train was running and would be here at 12:15am. We headed back down to the trains and still confused because the schedule was not showing our training. Finally we asked a very nice french man who explained that we needed to take the train to Alnay Sous Bois and at that point board a night time bus which would take us to our destination. What a relief! We finally arrived back at our hotel about 1am, very tired but happy to have made it in one piece. I told Amanda....this is how we roll, we usually have some kind of adventure like that on every trip!