Paris1

OK..... day 2 in Paris........ I'll let Lisa take up the commentary on how we got here....

"I am really surprised at myself about how excited I am about this.  You always hear about "Paris the romantic, beautiful city" etc etc… but I guess we are such New York-ophiles that I just thought, oh yeah Paris will be good, it will be good to check out all those museums and art galleries, but its just another big city…..  Its beaufiful and its exciting because there is so much traffic, and so many people and it is not set out on a grid, so navigation is not straightforward… and then the GPS dies….. well all I can say is that we have had an exciting afternoon!

We started the day in Limoges, a lovely city about 370 kms south of Paris, home of the beautiful Limoge porcelain….  Anyway, we had to meet the guy who was renting us our appartment in Paris at 4.00pm.  So we headed north, and decided to stop along the way for a break and a look around.  We stopped at Chateau de Chambord (see photos below)….. one of the biggest chateaus of them all apparently, built by Francois 11, absolutely amazing.  But we could only stop for an hour, we had our 4.00pm appointment!  So we got onto the toll roads and headed for the city.  We were amazed at how close we could get to such a city as Paris and stilll be surrounded by forests and farmland.  It wasn't until we were about 15kms out before it was obvious that we were near a major city. We had two GPS systems on board: the BMW system in our car and our portable TomTom…….  Its been quite interesting to compare the two, and until we got to the city, we had to hand it to TomTom - it found many more faster shorter, more intersting routes compared to the BMW…. but when it came to the city center and all those big buildings and narrow streets (we could only see a little bit of the sky above us)both GPS's fell down……. couldn't even identify our street…. oh no in Paris, already 10 mins late for meeting with our appartment greeter…..  BUT then Lucia looked up and said "there, there is rue de Santonge"!  We couldn't believe it, she was right, some how we had stumbled on our street... 

Then we had to return the car……..  All I can say is that we are sooooo glad that we managed to return the rental car and that we now no longer have a car in Paris!!!  We walked back to our appartment from the car rental place, stopping along the way for a few "vin de rouge s'il vous plais" and some great food and now we are collapsing in a heap!  Great, but exhausting day.  I can't wait to start exploring tomorrow!!"

Say no more....