Fireworks over the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty on the Seine, and 45 miles of walking through 2,000 years of history!
My husband surprised me with a trip to Paris, and after not traveling much since our big Greece trip last summer, I had serious wanderlust withdrawals. We landed Sunday morning, dropped our bags at the hotel, and went straight out to explore. By the time we flew home Thursday, we’d walked over 45 miles and covered more than 2,000 years of history – though I didn’t realize just how much of it until I got home.
That’s kind of my thing when I travel. I take everything in while I’m there, and then once I’m home, I start reading and researching and looking back through my photos, and that’s when the real story starts to unfold.
Take our first night, for example. It was 11p and we’d been walking all day and were starving. Figuring everything would be closed that late, we stumbled onto Au Pied de Cochon a 24/7 restaurant that has been a staple in Paris since 1947. I ordered something that sounded good, and the flavor was great – it was the texture that threw me off a little. Turns out I’d just eaten a pork trotter – pig’s feet – a real French delicacy loaded with collagen. That would explain the texture! I’m honestly glad I didn’t know while I was eating it. But I ate the whole thing. Funny… my high school French clearly didn’t serve me well, because it wasn’t until later that I also realized the name of the restaurant literally translates to “at the pig’s foot.”
We spent one afternoon at the Musée d’Orsay. We’re not big museum people, but my daughter insisted we’d love the architecture since it’s an old train station, and she was right. I got to see Starry Night in person, which was thrilling enough on its own. I also took a photo of myself looking out at one of the museum’s giant clock windows, with the Seine, the Louvre, and the Olympic cauldron in the background.
Weeks later, at home, I zoomed in on that photo and realized I could see Sacré-Cœur in the distance too – a detail I completely missed while I was standing right there.
Our last night, we had dinner reservations at Le Moulin de la Galette before heading to Moulin Rouge, a total bucket list moment for me. We started with escargot, burrata with tomatoes, followed by French filet of beef with Frites (french fries are really French) and finished with Crêpes Suzette… by far the best meal we had in Paris.
Earlier that same day, I’d taken a photo of myself in front of a windmill in Montmartre, just because it looked charming. It wasn’t until I got home and looked at Le Moulin de la Galette’s business card that I realized it was the very same windmill… a windmill that’s stood since the 1800s and been painted by Van Gogh.
And then there’s Rue Montorgueil, a pedestrian street right around the corner from our hotel that became our path back and forth to the Seine every night after we discovered it. We had no idea at the time that it’s famous enough to have been painted by Monet – a painting that, as it turns out, hangs in the Musée d’Orsay.
I’m also a huge Emily in Paris fan, and while I made a point of visiting a couple of filming locations… La Maison Rose and the “I Love You” wall in Montmartre, it wasn’t until I got home and rewatched all five seasons that I realized how much of the show I’d actually walked through without knowing it. Streets, corners, storefronts I’d passed a dozen times. Getting to relive the trip that way, discovering it all over again, was almost as fun as being there.
Not everything waited until we got home, though. Some of it we got to experience in real time, and it happened almost by accident. We were there the week of Bastille Day, and I’d originally booked our Seine River cruise for Tuesday. But my husband is a huge soccer fan, and France was playing Spain in the FIFA World Cup semifinals that Tuesday, so I switched our cruise to Monday to free us up for the game. That switch turned out to be the best decision – Monday night had fireworks.
We cruised the Seine past the Louvre, Notre Dame, and under the Pont Alexandre III, and on the way back we passed Paris’ very own Statue of Liberty sitting right in the middle of the river. As a New Yorker, seeing a piece of home in the middle of Paris was such a fun surprise. Our boat docked at the pier facing the Eiffel Tower, and we sat there watching fireworks shoot right out of it, along with a drone show, while avoiding the crowds packing the streets.
The next night, we put on our bleus and found a local pub to watch France take on Spain. Sadly, they lost, so it wasn’t quite the electricity of watching the Knicks win Game 5 back home, but it was still a fun way to spend an evening like a local.
Four days in Paris felt like getting hit with a fire hose, so much to see, so little time to take it all in. Weeks later, looking back at everything we explored, I’m still finding pieces of it I missed the first time around.
I’m so happy to be back out exploring again and already counting down the days to my next trip.
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