Paris Trip - A Day in the City

A rest day in Paris - what’s not to like!  Not a down day though, there’s a whole big city to re-explore and to introduce Chris to.  Actually, on a rest day, we rest, but not today.  Double decker bus tour at our the city to see the lay of the land and decide where to go for lunch - Montmarte or the Bastille Market for roast poulet and potatoes with a bottle of wine by the Seine?

Breakfast by while watching Paris wake up - coffees, croissants and tartine, but we think it’s a baguette, butter and jam

Sun coming out from behind the Eiffel Tower

The tour audio said this was a unicorn, where’s the horn then?   It’s an alicorn or possibly Pegasus?

The Grand Palais

Cafes and little bistros everywhere you look

Printemps, one of the first French department stores 

Bridge over the river Seine

The odd gargoyle

Musée de Orsay - there’s the most beautiful tearoom there

Wish we had time for a boat trip

We do get to ride the Champs d’Elysee to the Arc d’Triompe, just not on our bikes!

May be the most confusing roundabout ever!

Found some bigger beers!

Walked up all the steps to Montmarte, had lunch on the square and then saw the Sacre Coure, that beautiful white church overlooking the city

Frogs legs - yep, they taste like chicken

Easy escargot 

Dinner out on Ile St. Louis, on of our favourite places!  Enjoyed our dinner companion, His Majesty.

Paris at night, amazing place for an after dinner stroll!

Paris Trip - Vauxhall-sur-Seine to PARIS!

 Off we go, Eiffel Tower, here we come!  30 miles to go, should be a doddle, right?  Hmmm.

Left Vaux and went through Triel to cross the bridge across the Seine.  One of the more interesting things was the most enormous snail ever!  Can see why they’re a dinner delicacy.

Immediately missed a turn and ended up on the wrong road.  After debating going forward, decided not to repeat yesterday and headed back to the known route.  Went one more exit down and found our road into the cutest Seine-side village with some fantastic houses and a market!  We stopped for a croissant and coffee before heading up the hill.

That was the first of several hills.  The route meandered through park after park.  You wouldn’t expect so much green on a route coming into Paris.  Or so many hills.  Had a lovely lunch in Versailles and then made our way into the last bit of Saturday afternoon Paris chaos.  And it was chaos, bikes crashing into each other, parents on bikes w/ little tikes trying to follow, people shopping and wandering (without looking) into the road - made steering and navigation especially ‘interesting’!

Wish I could have taken pictures, but there needed to be extreme navigational focus as we got to the last part of the day.  Finally, finally made it to the bridge over the Seine and there was the Eiffel Tower!  What a place to finish!

Super excited to have done it and to be here!  It has been one of the more challenging routes so far, but worth it because we love Paris!  Chris said coming into Paris and finishing at the Eiffel Tower was one of the coolest things to have done!

Nice hotel, Hotel Exposition, easy walking distance from the Tower and convenient to everything.  Walked out to dinner at a very traditional French bistro, Le Commerce. Escargot was had!  Calf’s head was not!  Finished with the Mousse au Chocolate - perfect!  Now in bed listening to the sound of Saturday night Paris and looking forward to introducing Chris to more of the city tomorrow.

Paris Trip - Gournay-en-Bray to Triel-sur-Seine

La Coloc provided a very nice breakfast which included the discovery of a ‘traditionnelle’, my new favourite baguette.  It’s like a sourdough baguette. ‘une baguette traditionnelle, s’il vous plaît’ will be my boulangerie order from now on!

It was a day of six hills and other adventures.  We left Gournay after a lovely breakfast.  There was a bit of Avenue Verte and then ‘just us’ roads through the ‘Parc National’.  We rode on very small roads for miles with almost no traffic. Windy, but quiet and peaceful up on the tops of the hills.

We leapfrogged (leptfrogged?) as we made our way up and down those hills.  Chris was ‘King of the Mountains’, passing us on every one up, often like a rocket although he swears it didn’t feel like it.  Have to find him a spotted jersey.

We and our 500lbs barrelled past him on the downhills.

Onion fields were a new one to pedal past.  So aromatic, we thought someone was cooking!

E’cole with a door for girls and a door for boys.

The route was ‘baree’, but both Komoot and Google Maps said to take it so in true cyclist fashion we made our way around the barriers and over the downed metal gates.  What began as an Avenue Verte devolved to a crushed. gravel track to a rocky and unridable track (where we got off) to a path through the fields to a very rocky wooded trail which we clambered up and up.  Steve / Chris pushed the bikes up and over rocks and tree limbs.  We slogged along for the 4/10ths of a mile that Google promised led to a road, slightly suspiciously as Google claimed we were on a road, but as promised after the 4/10ths of clambering we made it to the road and hill overlooking our destination, Vaux-sur-Seine!  We’ve done a lot of ‘off roading’, this was a new level of ‘challenging’!

This trail would have been difficult in hiking boots, never mind wearing clackety-clack cycling shoes!

At the Vaux-sur-Seine sign leading down into the village where we’re staying tonight. We will be finding a new ‘non-mountain climbing’ route in the way back, but really happy to be here.  

Lovely pre-dinner walk down by the Seine with some beautiful houses across the way and barges slowly gliding by.

Had a crazy bar lady experience over drinks, she was sure all we were interested in was when they served food, even to the extent of carefully writing out the hours for me, when what we wanted was to pay her for the drinks.  Even my ‘Je voudrais l’addition pour le pichet de vin blanc et deux bieres, s’il vous plait’ both spoken and written via Google Translate didn’t make a dent.  She finally charged me for the pichet and i couldn’t get her to charge for the beers.  Right, eight euros it is then!  You find them in every country!

Had a great dinner at a Brazilian restaurant down by the river.  Platters of picana, wings and fritturas - just what was needed to restore all the energy burnt today!  And it wasn’t hard to order drinks at all!

Another hard one, but good.  Made it up lots of hills and didn’t fall when biking or hiking - that qualifies as a good day!