Journey to Paris and Home

At 3:20am we got up, showered and checked out of the hotel for our flight back to Paris. Since the jet lag was still real, we had no trouble getting up. Our flight left at 6:30am and we landed at Paris Charles De Gaulle airport just after 8am. After winding our way through the airport we finally found the train into the city. We got to our hotel and fortunately they l had a room available for us to check into early. After a short rest we were on the metro again heading for the Musée d’Orsay. We had never been to this museum before so it was nice to see something new in Paris.

Housed in an old train station, the center of the museum was lined with statues and sculptures. They have maps in the museum that highlight the popular art pieces so we focused our time on that.

They also had lots of paintings from masters like Roden and Vincent Van Gogh. The floor that contained the Van Gogh and Roden pieces was an absolute gong show with people, especially around the Starry Night painting.

The other crazy line up we dealt with was to take a photo in front of the backside of the giant clock. Eduardo waited 20-25 min for his turn. People tried to jump the queue but the people in line weren’t having any of it.

Here are a few more random items we got to see.

After a couple hours, we left and took the train to our next stop, the Catacombs of Paris. Before our 3pm ticket time, we had a quick stop at McDonalds where we had a drink and split a 6-pack of macarons. McDonald’s macarons aren’t the best in town, but not bad at all for the price.

The Catacombs of Paris are underground ossuaries in Paris, France, which hold the remains of more than six million people. Built to consolidate Paris’s ancient stone quarries, they extend south from the Barrière d’Enfer (“Gate of Hell”) former city gate; the ossuary was created as part of the effort to eliminate the city’s overflowing cemeteries. Preparation work began shortly after a 1774 series of basement wall collapses around the Holy Innocents’ Cemetery added a sense of urgency to the cemetery-eliminating measure, and from 1786, nightly processions of covered wagons transferred remains from most of Paris’s cemeteries to a mine shaft opened near the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire.

The ossuary remained largely forgotten until it became a novelty-place for concerts and other private events in the early 19th century; after further renovations and the construction of accesses around Place Denfert-Rochereau, it was opened to public visitation from 1874. Since 2013, the Catacombs have numbered among the fourteen City of Paris Museums managed by Paris Musées. Although the ossuary comprises only a small section of the underground mines of Paris, Parisians currently often refer to the entire tunnel network as the catacombs.

I think we walked down a stairwell about 4 storeys. At the bottom, we walked through a damp, darkened tunnel to the beginning of where the bones were laid. It’s unbelievable the shear volume of bones that we saw. As you can see in the photos, people went to great effort to stack them in a presentable way. Touching the bones was strictly forbidden and if caught, I think the fine was 15,000 Euro, so they weren’t joking around. It took us approximately 45 minutes to walk to the other end, which I think was about 1.5 km from the start. It was definitely worth seeing once but not likely something you need to see a second time.

After, it started to rain so we popped into a shopping mall nearby. My feet were getting really sore (flat feet don’t do so well with hours of walking on stone sidewalks and concrete) so I opted to head back to the hotel. Eduardo stayed out to do a little more exploring.

On our last morning, ironically we had our best sleep of the trip. Eduardo was still awake at his usual early time so he went to check out the Eiffel Tower and a couple other sights. Since we had just been to Paris last year, I opted to relax and sleep a little longer and eat the croissant, fruit and yoghurt we picked up the night before. The digital clock photo is the countdown clock for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.

We checked out around 11am headed back to the airport, retracing our steps from yesterday.

We got to the terminal, went through passport control and security and had about 1.5 hours before our flight.

Usually, flight board by zones now but for some reason, Westjet in Paris abandoned that whole concept and it was free-for-all. I’m not sure if it took more or less time in the end. The flight home was sold out so luckily we had a narrow shouldered girl in the middle seat.

Nine hours later we were in Calgary and quickly got through customs. We had about an hour to hang out in the lounge to get some food. The Calgary flight left a little late and we finally landed in Vancouver just after 7pm. Another successful trip for the books.