Today was an exhausting but very good day for several reasons:
1. We went to Paris. That was good because a) it's Paris, and b) we were eager to get out of Lille, which is just kind of "meh." We only stopped there because it was a convenient stop on the way from Belgium to Paris, and the hostels in Lille are tremendously cheaper than in Paris.
2. We met up with my friend Rick and his sister Natalie. Rick was on the cross country and track teams at UNK with me the past four years and was one of my roommates this past year. He and his sister Natalie were stopping in Paris on their way home from a mission trip in Kenya. They'll be traveling through France and a tiny bit of Switzerland for six days so we decided we'd meet up with them and explore Paris together.
3. Most importantly, I found out my niece, Eliza Quinn Precht, was born last night. She's adorable and I can't wait to meet her!
Getting to Paris was kind of a debacle. We wanted to leave Lille in the morning but just missed the 10am train and the next two "rush hour" trains (rush hour is at noon in France?) were much more expensive. We ended up taking the 1:15 train, got to Paris in an hour (it's a bullet train), but didn't make it to the hostel on the other side of town until 3:30 or so. There, we met up with Rick and Natalie. After picking up some supper from a super market, we all headed to the park near the Eiffel Tower to eat. Later, Rick and I went for a run. It was the first time that I had someone to run with on this trip, so it was a nice change. We took off for the River Seine...or so we thought. I in fact led us down the right street but in the wrong direction, so we ended up running through the less exciting neighborhoods in the area around our hostel. We eventually ended up in the Luxembourg Gardens, though, one of several palace gardens in Paris, where we ran into a big group of Japanese tourists and were asked by an old man to pose for a photo with him. I guess we look famous or something?
I had to take the run really easy because my ankle was bothering me a little worse than before. I think it may have something to do with all the walking I've been doing in my Toms, which are comfy but have almost zero cushioning. We actually ran about 7 miles I guesstimate (didn't have my watch on this time) but we ended up walking over 6 miles later that night. Add the mile of walking in Lille that Curtis and I did on the way to the train station in the morning plus the mile we did in Paris earlier in the day, and that's about 8 miles of walking for the day! Good thing I decided to switch out my Toms for my running shoes for the whole day. They're much easier on my feet! We didn't actually mean to do all that walking that night. Rick, Natalie, and I decided to walk to the Eiffel Tower and then walk along the River Seine for a ways before taking the metro back to our hostel, which would have been about 3 miles of walking. Unfortunately, European ticket machines tend not to accept American credit cards, and this was the case with the metro station's machines, so we walked the whole way back. I and my legs were very much ready for some rest.
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| Do I need a caption? |
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| Luxembourg Palace, Paris |
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| Rick and I |
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| Luxembourg Palace |
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| Behold the statue |
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| Fountain at Place de la Concorde - near where they chopped people's heads off with the guillotine |
Entry from a late reader to your blog. I liked this post because a) even though France is nice, I agree that Eliza is much more important than Paris, b) getting to and from Paris is somehow always a fiasco- sorry you experienced it too, c) the number of miles you're covering on your feet is mind boggling, have fun!
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