Day 1 - Arrival in Paris

Well, we made it! Yay for us! The flight over here was quite long and arduous. Although we really enjoyed the flight into Paris on the new A380 Airbus, there is nothing you can do to stop those children screaming and pushing their feet into your seats along the way. Apart from that, it was also a struggle to get some decent sleep on the flight - we had hoped to get more than about two hours between us. We watched a few movies, including a very funny French one "Day Off" and arrived in Paris at about 6.35am - from that moment we started to really enjoy ourselves. We collected our luggage and found the Air France bus to the city with very little trouble, drawing upon my extensive French language skills - lol. Kym reckons that although Rod's French may not be totally A1, it is his convincing accent that leads people to believe that he maybe fluent. This is a problem - as he needs them to speak slowly in order for him to understand them. They soon realise he is an imposter!

Anyhow, we digress. Deeming it far too early to check-in at around 8am, we decided to take a leisurely walk to our hotel and take in a few of the sights along the way. Mention should be made that Kym's luggage weighed in at an extraordinarily low 5.2 kilograms at Tullamarine - even the check-in attendant questioned it. Wow - she is such an experienced packer!! Rod thinks it was deliberately done in order to stuff all her shopping into her bags on the way back!! We viewed the Arc de Triomphe, walked along the whole length of the famous Champs Elysees, walked right around the Place de la Concorde and inspected the world-heritage-listed Jardin des Tuillieres - where we rested for a good while (see pic) and composed our thoughts. A really lovely spot. Then we checked into our hotel and had a well deserved shower. Gee it was good. The sun is pouring down on us here at the moment and, having come from our lovely Melbourne winter, it is a shock to our system to find ourselves sweating. We feel we are running on empty though now, so we are going to catch a few zeds and hopefully wake up a little more "with it" in a couple of hours, ready to tackle some more of this truly great city.