Paris, the city of love, the city of lights, the city of stairs…so many damn stairs!

The rain had finally calmed down for at least a day and we knew we needed to take advantage of this chance to roam and be tourists…but as we set out first to see the Louvre bright and early, I had no idea what a trek was actually in store for me!

The Louvre was quiet at opening time…we popped in the “Secret Entrance” (aka, not under the giant glass pyramid that everyone uses) and were inside in seconds.   We had already decided months ago we would skip the Mona Lisa because neither of us had the desire to wait an hour to be pushed into a room and view a painting smaller than our coffee table book when the building was literally covered in masterpieces.   But then we went up a flight of stairs and around a corner and there she was, almost lonely.   Honestly, we strode right up to her and took a selfie (sorrynotsorry), laughed at our good luck and then reevaluated our entire plan for the day.   With an unknown amount of time in a near private museum, we decided to rush around to see the “highlights” before the crowds and tour groups overwhelmed them and then start over slowly visiting the exhibits we actually wanted to see.

The problem with this plan is large sections of the Louvre are under construction, or restoration, so in order to get from point A to point B, it often involves going down 2 flights of stairs and then up 3!  All. Morning. Long.   By the time we had seen all there was to see at the museum (or rather, seen all we could see before everything just started to run together into categories of “old and pretty”), we had easily climbed and hiked a couple miles…and it was still before noon!  We exited into the beautiful gardens and knew we had to take advantage of this dry, sunny day for as long as it lasted and began another long trek to the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées…but before we got out of the gardens, we realized that was really far away and the wind was arctic-cold and bellowing about, and so diverted our trek to the Metro to take us to the stop by the Arc instead…

At the Arc, my husband convinced me that the only option was to climb the 284 stairs…at this point of the day I was cursing him, but later that would seem like a tiny blip in my climbing repertoire.   Up top, we circled to see the 12 roads spoking off of the circle and the beautiful tree lined city in front of us.   Compared to Rome, Paris surprised us with the amount of green space and trees everywhere.   For 2 very old cities, they are so amazingly different as well!

At this point, it was clearly lunchtime and so we found a little cafe with a view of the Arc.   We were enjoying a little wine and had just cut into our meals when the dreaded rain kicked up again…with a vengeance!   We were seated inside a covered sidewalk area, but the wind whipped against the glass walls and slammed stemware into the windows.   Patrons ran inside and we looked at each other for a minute with a shrug, it would calm down, and we were hungry!  But it didn’t calm down, and suddenly a waiter came up to us and the one other young couple who had held out and grabbed for our plates saying “Okay, go now!”   What was I to do?  I poured the rest of the wine into our 2 glasses, picked them up with my purse, and fled to the restaurant!

After the excitement of lunch finally died down, along with the flash storm, we decided we didn’t want to retreat to the apartment quite yet and pressed our luck with the weather (it was sunny again!) once more to go see the Eiffel Tower up close and personal.  We had pre-booked tickets to the top (third floor) on our last night in Paris, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t sit below it and take some daylight pictures while the sun was out, right?

Oh how wrong.   I should know now after so many years with my husband that this would never be enough.   Once there, he started talking about going up.   The elevator tickets were sold out far in advance, he knew that….but he saw people on the stairs.   (Damn those people…)  So we bought stairs tickets…and climbed 704 more stairs to see the view we already paid to see in 2 more days….and my ridiculous husband had the audacity to actually run up the damn things!

[Ed. note: I like tall things, and I like going to the top of tall things. It’s fun to take stairs when they’re available, because you get to see neat things along the way. I think my wife and I have very different definitions of fun though. Her face when I told her we were going to climb the stairs to the top of Notre Dame the next day…]