Bonjour, Paris

“What an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!” -Charles Dickens

"When Rick Steve said you can't do all of Paris in just a few days, he'd obviously never traveled with Tara,” said Rusty after spending a few whirlwind days in Paris. 
The EuroStar is amazing and we were in Paris a mere 2 hours after leaving London.  

First stop? The iconic Eiffel Tower, of course!
   

It was raining (a theme of our trip) but that actually made things kind of fun.  And I'm sure it shortened the lines :)  We didn't want to wait in the long lines for the elevators, and hiking one set of massive stairs at St Paul's wasn't quite enough for one day, so we decided to take the 674 stairs up to the second level on the Tower.  When we got up there we had so much fun picking out famous landmarks and orienting ourselves to the city.  Every hour, on the hour the Eiffle Tower lights start to sparkle.  Our view of the sparkles wasn't the best, but it was so magical to see it all lit up on our first night in Paris.
  Remember how we didn't want to wait in long lines for the elevators??  Well, there was a medical emergency on the stairs and so they closed them off.  We ended up waiting forever in that darn line to come back down the elevator.  After we got down we took the obligatory photos (Rusty says this one looks like a high school dance picture) and hunted down a nutella crepe.
  It was every bit as good as we imagined it would be.  Rusty said his favorite food of the trip were all the street crepes in Paris.
  We took our time getting back to the hotel just soaking in the sights and sounds of Paris.  We absolutely loved all the little cafes and the fact that all the chairs are squished to one side of the small bistro tables to facilitate people watching.  So fun!
Rusty also thought it was pretty funny that safety seems a little lax in Paris--you can open the doors and jump off the Metro before it stops moving.  The Metro stations are pretty dirty and gheto, but the Paris Metro goes EVERYWHERE.  It was so easy to get where we needed to be. Being in Paris seriously felt like a dream.  What more could a girl want out of life than being in Paris with my man?