Onto Paris! By Dave

We had to catch a bus for an hour or so from Stockholm to the airport to go to France, so we had to get up reasonably early (for a holiday anyway!) to have breakfast, get to the bus station and find our bus. We just managed to sneak on to the bus, there were a few people heading to the airport, I think we were in the last 5 or so to get on, so the bus was jam-packed. During this bus ride we saw a moose cruising through a paddock just near the motorway, they are massive, and kind of dopey looking, although the way it was running with it’s head bobbing all over the place probably didn’t help!! Awesome to see, although it was a very quick look out the bus window.

Eventually got to the airport, RyanAir have a habit of flying out of smaller airports an hour or so out of main cities, cheaper I suppose! We had to pay a bit of excess baggage, but even with the buses, and baggage, the flights were still cheap. We had a bit of spare Swedish Kroner, so spent it on some souvenirs and a bit of food, unfortunately the chocolates that we got there, that we thought were Scandinavian only, seemed to pop up regularly in airports from here until Australia!!

It was a pretty uneventful flight got us to Beauvais, about 80km out of Paris, where we had to catch another bus for an hour or so to get in to our hotel, and then catch the Metro (very similar to the London tube) to get close enough to our hotel to walk! During the bus trip into Paris, we had to suspend a game that Alice picked up during her previous trips to Europe, similar to “Punch Buggy”, where you punch the other person when you see a VW Beetle, but with smart cars rather than Beetles. Alice was a bit upset when I got the upper hand (well and truly, might I add!!), so demanded that we suspend the game. She’ll say it was due to me cheating, but I just had the window seat!!

The view of Paris as we drove in on the bus (other than smart cars), was pretty unspectacular (especially after being in transit for about 4 hours or so), until the Eiffel Tower popped into view, amazing (for me, this is Dave writing!) to see something so recognisable suddenly there and dominating the skyline.

We eventually found the hotel, which was in a nice small, quiet street, looking out the window we could see the beam of light from the top of the Eiffel Tower, although you can probably see this from most areas of Paris!! We went out for a bit of a walk to find some food, ended up at what we thought would be a dodgy Chinese place heating food up in a microwave, but it was actually pretty good. We spent a fair bit of time walking around (about 2 hours all up), eventually ending up at the Eiffel Tower, all lit up, and with it sparkling for 10 minutes every hour. Very spectacular, well worth the walk, Alice had forgotten her big camera, but we still got some good shots of it, in between being hassled to buy souvenirs, illegally under the tower. We stayed there for about an hour or so, then headed back to the hotel to bed.