Paris Walking Tour & Night Train
This morning we had several hours of free time. My family (Petersons) chose to eat breakfast at a French cafe near our hostel. The kids enjoyed crepes with Nutella. We also washed our clothes at a laundromat and shoved everything back in our suitcases... not a fun way to spend our last morning in Paris! Other families spent the morning more pleasantly, strolling through the city.
At 1:00 some of our group members met at the Arc de Triomphe and and Cindy led them down the Champs Elysees. A walking tour of the city with our professional guides began at 2:00. We culminated the tour with a picnic in an enclosed garden area. Some of us opted out of the picnic to enjoy wonderful French food at a nearby bistro.
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| Ken and Jake enjoying our last meal in Paris. |
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| The unique stairwell in our Paris hostel. |
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| Our Paris walking tour culminated outside the Louvre, formerly a Palace for the royal family. |
Finally, we said "Au Revoir" to Paris, got our luggage from the hostel and took the Metro to the Gare de Lyon train station. We boarded the Thello train for a 10 hour overnight ride to Milan, where we connected to another train to Florence. On this high speed electric train we had sleeping cars, with six bunks to a room. Accommodations were very tight and I didn't sleep, but most people slept a little. We travelled through Switzerland and the Alps during the night, I wish I could have seen the mountains out the window! We travelled through some really, really long tunnels, 20-30km in length! I can't imagine what it took to dig those long tunnels through the mountains.
This is a screen shot from Google Maps on my iPhone as I tracked our progress through the Swiss Alps at 3:30 AM! Our location is the blue dot near the center. While my train cabin mates slept, I laid awake, aware and sad that I couldn't see the beautiful mountains we passed through!
