London
Click to see our London trip report
Paris
The dream trip for a 21 year old design student! As a mom, I had images of spending mornings lolly gagging through museums, strolling the Champs Elysee arm in arm, snacking on french bread and cheese in the Tuileries. Ahh, and sometimes reality meets the dream...
As we arrived on a beautiful sunny Saturday, Paris was hit with a deadly lightening storm that sent most of the population of Paris scurrying for the metro, at the EXACT same moment we were trying to negotiate the turnstile of the Metro pulling our roller bags. (Travel Tip 1: there's a handicapped/stroller entrance; if you have luggage, use this) As our bag jammed in the turnstile, traffic built up behind us, eye rolling commenced and I was glad my French was limited as already irritated, soaked Parisians tried to push past us. We tried reinsert our 3 day unlimited transit passes to free the bags, and the passes were rejected, leaving the bags hopelessly stuck in turnstile (Travel tip 2: if you have an unlimited use transit pass, you are usually prohibited from using it twice in a short period of time- usually to prevent more than one person from using it at a time, see Travel Tip 1!) Finally, an annoyed transit worker freed our bags and escorted us to the handicapped/stroller entrance with an exasperated wave of the hand. Yup, sometimes with travel, there's your imagination, then there is reality!
Click on the photo below for a link to our Paris trip report, which although soggy, turned out to be pretty great after our initial challenges using the transit system!