Plane flights and Paris

An accumulated 14 Hours on a plane wasn't lots of fun, but we made it and even managed to get our passports stamped as we went through Finland! bummer was that we didn't need to get them stamped when we came into France as we didn't pass through customs in France, once you're in Europe, you're in Europe it would seem.

Flights were good, Finnair seems to have more legroom than Qantas, probably because every Finnish male we saw was around 6'4"

Landed in Paris after a 2.5 hour flight back from Helsinki, welcomed by pouring rain, managed to get lost in the airport no less than 3 times looking for where we needed to be to pickup the car, but eventually got there after a couple of mildly confusing(for everyone concerned) phone calls.

Picked up the brand new Renault Megane, stalled it trying to leave car park and then proceeded to head for the wrong side of the road while exiting the carpark, I swear that the office staff at Renault Drive are not expecting to get the car back in one piece after that display of awesomeness.

The car lease company had given us instructions on how to get to the nearest petrol station as the car only has a smallamount of fuel in it at pickup. So we punch the hotel address into the GPS and off we go, handily the GPS was guiding us right past the petrol station anyway, so that was easy or so we thought, pull up at the petrol pump, jump out and start filling the car, nope nothing happening, as this pump had a credit card slot I tried putting a card in there, nope still no luck, looking around I realised that the other pumps didn't have card readers so I assumed that this pump was for a special card and moved to another pump, not easy as the petrol station was crowded. Pull up at pump #2 try again, still no luck, then a womans voice comes over the loud speaker, speaking french of course, I look up and the woman behindthe counter is waving her arms in the air, this isn't going to be as easy as I thought, so I head into the building and there are lots of people standing around looking confused, it's at this point that I realise that no-one is putting any fuel in any cars, Carol starts asking questions and it turns out that the computer system is broken, so no fuel.

So we use the GPS again, and ask it to find us a petrol station nearby, it takes us off the main road which is nice, but remember it's still raining heavily, and I'm still getting used to the combination of being on the wrong side of the road, having the gearstick on the wrong side(yes it's manual) and having the blinkers and the wipers reversed, I indicated more than once trying to get the wipers going. So the GPS takes us on a bit of a journey, and with only about 1k to go, tells us to turn the wrong way down a one way road, so after doing 2 laps of a long block to check that we really couldn't go where it was telling us we pick the next petrol station and head off, finally we find a petrol station that works and fill the car, there was much rejoicing.

Once that was done we reset the GPS to the hotel, and after another 2 or 3 wrong turns we were on our way. Next up was a traffic jam on the main highway into Paris, GPS pops up and tells us there's a traffic jam and it's got a faster way to the hotel, we select "go for it" and we're off through the back streets of the outskirts of Paris, it's at this point that I realise that everyone who said "parisians just park anywhere" is telling the truth, there was a double or triple parked car to negotiate at least every 200m, and most of the time it was more like every 100m, but we were making good progress and the parisians are very used to you driving at them on the wrong side of the road, due to all of the double parked cars, so I fit right in ;-)

With about 2k's to go to the hotel, I open my big mouth and say to Carol, if this GPS takes me anywhere near the Arc de Triumphe, I'm bailing out, I've read that you're not insured on that piece of road and I'm not planning on having an accident on my first day, although we'vealready had several near misses, not all of them my fault either. About 5 seconds after I open my mouth, we look up and we're driving straight down Charles de Gaul ave, straight for that bloody roundabout. So I pike, make a right turn, go about 2 blocks and make a left, and for the next kilometer or so, every time the GPS says turn left, I swear at it.

We do manage to avoid the Arc de Triumphe and have a relatively uneventful trip to the hotel, we park the car and head on in only to find out I've booked the hotel for the wrong dates!! Nice one Rich, lucky for us the hotel has spare rooms and we're fine, yes I have checked the other bookings and they're fine so I don't know what brain fade caused that one.

So after our eventful trip into Paris we head off to find some food, haven't eaten for about 8 Hours so we were getting a bit peckish, once that was sorted we headed off for the Eiffel Tower, it really is impressive in real life, and we managed to walk up to the second level, about 600 steps I think, took plenty of Photos of course and from there we wandered along the North bank of the Seine, finding a couple of closed Muesums along the way.

That'll do for now, I'm off for brekky and then we're off to the Louvre.

Pictures from Day 1 in Paris