Adventure in Europe Part I

For the next several blog posts, I'm writing up our recent trip to France and Switzerland in travelogue style. Part I starts here:

Our trip actually started by visiting Madrid, the Madrid airport anyway. Our flight was on Iberia and we actually changed planes in Madrid in route to Paris’s smaller airport called Orly. After arriving in Paris, we decided to take care of some practicalities like getting Euros, picking up our pre-ordered train tickets, and buying a Paris museum pass. According to our guidebook (Rick Steves), a shuttle bus service called Jetbus was available to take us from the Orly airport to the Paris Metro closest to our Hotel. Even though it was still listed on the web, the Tourist desk at the airport told us that the shuttle was no longer running. Eventually they told us of a regular French bus that would run to the same metro station. We followed a circuitous route through a series of tunnels until we reached a door with partially shattered glass. This lead to a highway under an overpass with fast moving traffic. After we got to the highway, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a bus coming with the name of our Metro stop. Sarah and I sprinted the 25 yards (with all our luggage of course) and barely made the bus. Regrettably, we hadn’t read the section on how the buses work, so we were caught staring blankly at a stone-face French bus driver who obviously spoke no English. As we searched for money to pay (we had no coins anyway), the bus driver pulled on without giving us a second look. As we observed people boarding the bus, almost all already had a bus ticket which they validated/scanned against a ticket machine. Either the bus driver thought that in all our fumbling we were searching for our ticket, or he just didn’t care. Regardless, we left the bus quickly when it got to our stop and were thankful for the free transportation. Only one hour in France and we committed our first illegal act!

After our initial adventure, we didn’t have much time for sightseeing after checking into our hotel. We walked to Notre Dame and did the free tour inside. It was definitely worth it, but fairly typical for a European cathedral. For as famous as it is, I was expecting something more grandiose on the inside. We had some yummy Crepes that evening at a restaurant called La Crepe Rit du Clown as we struggled to stay awake until normal bed time.

View of Notre Dame