Heading Into Paris

Thursday 31st January 2008 dawned cold and frosty. I sneaked a look out of the hotel window and shivered.

We had decided to have a day in Paris itself and, given that we had already spent a day in the Disney Studios and another in the Disneyland Park itself and given further that it was our last full day in France, there was no choice but to pull on the woolly hat which had tried all of its own accord to emulate Mickey's ears all week.

We started off by catching the free shuttle to the Disney Village and railway station. Then in mine bestest French I managed to secure day passes for the trains to include the metro and buses in Paris. These are called Mobilis tickets although it's a different ticket for a two-day pass. The train terminates at Marne la Vallée station, so it came in one way, we got on, and it left again in the direction it had come from. We swapped seats to face forward and settled down. As we stopped at the various stations the train started to fill up. A young woman sat opposite us and pulled out a Nintendo DS and that kept her happy for a full half hour until she got off. "If you'd have brought yours, you could have linked!" I said to Fran.

We went around 17 stations to Charles de Gaulle Étoile where we swapped to another line and headed for the Eiffel Tower. We got on the Metro train, where I saw a poster and my French was just about enough to realise the station we wanted was closed. We had to go past it to the next one and then walk back. It was cold, but very sunny and so it wasn't an unpleasant walk. It took us around 15 minutes to get to the Tower that we had decided we were going to go up! And so we shall - in the next article!