Vive La France!

Harry is a little bit obsessed with the Eiffel Tower. This has something to do with Lightning McQueen or some other animated dreamscape, but (besides Oscar’s trampoline) it’s really all he wanted to see in France. So he was ready to get to Paris.

We arrived at Montparnasse around noon on Bastille Day, and by the time we’d made it to lunch Harry has purchased (with his own French cash) four versions of the Eiffel Tower to take home. I’m telling you, reeeeaally into the Eiffel.

We’d discovered our friend Shuja, who is usually running a digital marketing company in Romania, was in town for the day as well. Perfect. In the photo above, Harry is “cheersing” the Eiffel Tower with Shuja over lunch near the Bastille monument. A very fitting start-of-the-day toast to our host city.

The city was more red, white and blue than usual. But beautiful, as always. I love it in Paris that you can walk around and see these opulent,  historic buildings…buildings which would be the main attraction in any other city…but here they’re just the post office or an accountants office or something.

But our goal was the get the Eiffel…and we were getting closer.

We decided to take a boat tour to get even closer.

It worked.

Mission accomplished. Harry was thrilled. But he wanted to stand closer to it.

So we decided to hike around the city a bit.

We walked from Notre Dame to St. Germain … and just kept going. Toward the Eiffel Tower like moths to a flame.

It was beautiful. That yellow shop there in the right of that photo is the cutest little stationery store. I could have stayed in there for 2 hours. Harry was ready to go after 2 minutes.

Next time I go back, I’d like to stay in the St. Germain area. And spend more time in the little shops.

And definitely spend time in places like this. Harry wasn’t that into stopping at this place.

We we were on a mission. We were walking to the Eiffel Tower to see the fireworks.

I should interject here that I was leading this have-to-see-the-fireworks mission. We all have different travel styles. James is the cool one who’d be fine spending the day in a couple of coffee shops and pubs, taking a few things in at a leisurely pace. I’m the one with the map and the plan marching forward to make sure we see EVERYTHING WE CAN POSSIBLY SEE IN THE FASTEST AMOUNT OF TIME POSSIBLE NO MATTER WHAT! Harry likes to run and jump and touch everything and buy candy.

We were quite a trio making our way across Paris.

But we finally made it to the Eiffel.

And you know who lives right next to the Eiffel Tower?…Jordan Ferney.

Despite the complete lack of data and cell coverage available (because of the massive crowd near the Eiffel), she somehow found us. She is magic.

Seriously, Jordan is awesome. Her life in Paris is beautiful. Her apartment is in the raddest location. And how cute is she? (Also, notice, working the French stripes.) ! I think this photo above may have convinced me to try bangs again. What do you think?

And then…finally…THE FIREWORKS! After I dragged these boys across the city and then stressed that we weren’t in the right spot, Jordan helped us get in the best location to see the Bastille Day fireworks. So incredibly awesome. Photos don’t do them justice, of course. Especially because I only had the point and shoot in Paris because I didn’t charge the other camera properly. Yay me. More motivation to get back to Paris and spend the day leisurely photographing the city between coffee shop stops.

Paris is such an inspirational city. Art and beauty are everywhere. Even the mundane…the streets, the water spigots, the mailboxes…is artful and creative. On Bastille Day, it feels especially alive.

I’ve actually been to Paris on Bastille Day before, but this time it seemed even more electric.

At one point before the Fireworks began, I took this photo of the Tower. I swear to you it was a totally black, no biggy shot from the little street corner we were perching on. No lighting anywhere. Weird. You know how they say ghosts or spirits or whatever show up in photos as orbs? Yeah. There was a lot of spirited celebration going on in Paris that night.

So let’s review. In 12 hours…we arrived at Montparnasse, went straight to our hotel near the Louvre, then the Louvre, walked to the Bastille Monument for lunch, then back to our hotel, then back to Notre Dame, then a boat ride down to the Eiffel Tower, then walked from Notre Dame to Saint Germain to Assemble National, to the Eiffel Tower, to the Concord, to the Opera House, to the Louvre. Whew.

By the end of the day, we were all spent. This is what the walk home looked like. Harry was out. James and I took turns carrying him. We did Paris. And we were done.

We slept for 3 hours and woke up to head to Charles de Gaulle.

Vive la France!

And we’re out.