11.7 miles walked
26,082 Steps Walked
Our day started when we woke up at 3:00/4:00 am Central Daylight Time in Iowa. Spoiler alert: It will end on Friday, June 20 at 9:00pm Central European Time, which is 2:00pm on Friday in Iowa. I’ll save you the math, that’s almost 36 hours. Yeah…things get a little Alice-in-Wonderland as the exhaustion sets in. Stay tuned.
Evan’s mom, Megan, picked us up at 5:00am to drive us to the airport. BLESS HER! She was such a good sport.
As we were walking to our gate, Caleb asked a very honest question: “When will it be tomorrow?” To which I answered like comedian Nate Bargatze when he played George Washington on SNL: “Nobody knows…”
Our plane from Des Moines to Charlotte took off at 7:00am. It was a decent size plane coming out of Des Moines. I take this flight frequently for work (well the 5:00am version of it), and it is not usually this busy. Summer travel season is underway!
We sent Cameron the picture above, and he sent us this picture of he and Isabelle. He had been traveling with her family since their classes ended.
The trip has begun!
I don’t usually fly right over downtown Des Moines like this, so I took a quick shot.
Airport tshirts are so accurate.
Airport pizza wasn’t half bad.
Airport artwork was actually quite exceptional.
Airplane food was less exceptional. Now we are on the international flight and enjoying dinner. It really wasn’t bad.
At night, the LED lighting is blue. When they wanted you to wake up, it turned orange like a sunrise and kept getting brighter.
We made it through customs and were greeted by this guy. It was so good to see him!! And he out did himself with the welcome poster…considering his limited resources.
We were picked up by a reserved driver at the airport (cheaper than a taxi for six people). The ride into central Paris where our Air BnB is near Opera was stop and go the whole way. It was a lot to stomach, so when we got to about a ten minute walk to our destination we begged the driver to just let us out. He did and we were very relieved to walk to the luggage storage location.
We reserved a locker to store our luggage for the day because it was only 10:00am at this point and we couldn’t check into our apartment until 4:00pm. We used Bounce. They were easy and great to work with.
After we dropped off luggage we walked toward the Louvre (close to our apartment) and found a cafe to sit and enjoy a drink and some sandwiches. It was a very hot day over 90 degrees. And the fatigue was really setting in at this point.
We didn’t take any pictures during this time, but Matt did take a quick selfie as we walked down a side street.
This next picture is a shopping mall. Very high end. More security employees than sales employees. We couldn’t even enter some stores without a credit/bank account check. Not exactly our kind of place, but the building was amazing. We assumed it was built for some grand purpose and then repurposed as a mall, but it was actually built as a mall.
Some of the stores are above the dome, so you could see the outside of the dome with the stained glass.
If you go all the way to the top, this mall had a rooftop with beautiful views of Paris.
A picture of our tour guide. Okay, his sister actually snapped this pic just as he was saying something and this is how it turned out. Oops. He was very comfortable in Paris and really led the way today. I was so grateful considering how tired I was. It is a proud and interesting moment as a parent when your child becomes the leader and you become the follower.
To keep us awake and busy doing something on that first day (ugh), I booked a guided tour through the Louvre. I’m actually glad I did. But things got a bit tough during that tour when some of us started “glitching” due to fatigue. At least three of us almost fell asleep standing up. The Louvre is not air conditioned (hardly anywhere in Paris is), so it got very hot. Every time we stood in one place it was easy to want to close your eyes.
I’m not sure when this part of the museum opened, but this is an excavation of the original foundation of the palace. No one was more impressed than Evan.
One of the masterpieces we saw at the Louvre. Venus de Milo.
Of course the Mona Lisa. The first time I saw this 25 years ago I recall thinking how much smaller it was than I expected.
This picture cracks me up because Grace was loopy and Evan was completely checked out. We were all SO TIRED!
FINALLY it was time to check into the apartment. We are on the fourth floor and we had luggage so we decided to take the elevator. This thing was insanely small. Technically rated for four people, but ONLY if you know those four people REALLY well. Even two would be awkward if you didn’t know each other.
So Cameron and I went up first. As we got on we told the others to push the button to call it back once we got off. We got to the top and it immediately turned around and went back down. The doors opened at the bottom with us still on and everyone was laughing so hard we had tears. They had pushed the button too soon! (This pic does not do the size of this elevator justice.)
Once we got to the apartment, no one had enough energy to think about food, so sadly, our first meal in Paris was from the restaurant on the first floor of our building: Burger King. At this point we weren’t even pronouncing English words accurately, soooo…feel free to judge us.
A small group of mighty warriors in our group, led by Cameron who was not struggling with jet lag, walked to a nearby corner grocery store and grabbed a couple things for breakfast the next morning.
Cameron started some laundry and we called it a night. Whew! What a day…uh, I mean, days.
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