Day Six-- A Travel Day

Travel days can be stressful.  You worry about being ready, not missing your transportation, do you have the passport and the right tickets, and it is a lot of "hurry and wait"  It can be tiring.....

but it is also pretty exciting to get in a train in one country and ended up in another country.

Construction and these cranes are everywhere in downtown London.

Wednesday morning consisted of our last drive through London on the way to King's Cross train station and our train "The Eurostar" between London and Paris.  For those who are geographically challenged, that includes a drive under the famous English Channel  (in a tunnel, of course.)  The whole trip took about 2 1/2 hours.

The only down side of the train that we weren't prepared for was your luggage is your responsibility and there is not a lot of places to store things on the train, so that was a bit of a trick since we had to take everything with us.  Most people were traveling with just a duffle bag or backpacks, it seemed on our part of the train.

It was also hard to get pictures of the English and then the French countryside through the windows due to the pace of the train.  Imagine lots of rolling hills, farms, and tiny towns with churches in each of them.  Gary actually slept through the entire tunnel--didn't miss much scenery then.  You could actually rent VR googles which showed underwater sea creatures as you went through the tunnels.  They were marketed for children, but I wondered if it would make kids more nervous rather than less.

Paris Train station:

Paris drivers have their own style of craziness on the road and we were all glad to not be driving through the city to our hotel.

Construction is happening in Paris as well.  Restoration is very important in France and the outsides of buildings can not be changed without permission from several government departments which rarely happens.

I liked the contrast of light and dark on this photo--a street scene in Paris.  The black rectangle in the middle of the photo is his phone with the directions to our hotel.  All of our taxi drivers used different types of GPS to get the route and monitor traffic. Back in the days of Hong Kong, those drivers just had to learn the confusions of roads in a city of 7 million.

Old buildings everywhere and each one a work of art to me---

We got settled a bit in our hotel, but then it was off to our first Paris adventure--we had to dress up a bit from our normal travel ware--for our dinner Cruise on the Seine River.

Interesting garbage cans which we saw throughout the city.  (Gary laughed when I took this picture and said that he knew I couldn't resist it.)

Vonette and Gary waiting to board the cruise--

The glass reflections made this hard to see, but this is the route we traveled on the cruise and the major buildings we saw from the river.

When asked in Paris, you want "still" water," not sparkling!

And of course, on a river in a major and very old city, there are lots of bridges....

and old buildings.....

 and more old bridges...

some which are very ornate.

We passed by the Notre Dame on both sides as the boat went around the island that it sits on and returned back up the river to our starting spot.

Houses--most which have been made into apartment buildings with the highest floors usually being tiny quarters where students might live and bathrooms shared.

The Louvre was HUGE!

And inside the boat, we were also having a three-course French meal.  Here were a couple of the desserts.

 Some first views of the Eiffel Tower from the boat..

Just prior to the end of our cruise--that is the famous Seine River in back.

The landing dock for the cruise was very near to the base of the Eiffel Tower.  We didn't go there tonight as we had tickets to go up the following day.

Heading to the taxi stand for the ride home:

Our room was the "biggest" so we gathered for some game playing.  We played "Five Crowns--appropriate for a trip in Europe, right?

We had to take a chair from the Kerr's room and our two night stands for the table and the three siblings had to sit on the edge of the bed.  The stuff memories are made of!

I don't know about everyone else, but I was ready for sleep.  It had been a fun day of traveling both by train and my boat.