It had been 34 years since I last visited France. Since Kathy had never been there and Paris was just a three hour flight from Bucharest, Romania where we ended our 11-day Danube River cruise, we decided to stop in Paris and spend six days in France on the way home. I’ve wanted to see Normandy for a long time so this was my opportunity.

Before we left the U.S., we each purchased two different multi-day passes for Paris – a Metro/Rail pass and a Paris Museum Pass. Even though we each had a suitcase and carry on bags, we decided to use the passes and take the train and Metro from Charles de Gaulle Airport to our hotel. We figured out the system and managed to not get lost.

The only glitch was I tried to get my suitcase through one of the Metro station turnstiles sideways and it got stuck. The gates closed on me and the suitcase was REALLY jammed. I gave my pass to a woman waiting to go through behind me and when she opened the gates with it, I pulled as hard as I could and finally freed my suitcase. I really felt like an idiot and thought the situation would have made a really funny video for YouTube. I decided right then and there that we were taking a taxi back to the airport from the hotel no matter what it would cost!

We arrived at our hotel and had to laugh at the elevator there. It barely had room for both of us without our bags so we decided to haul our bags up three flights of stairs. Our room was tiny but doable as it was fairly cheap for a Paris hotel and we weren’t going to spend much time there anyway.

I read that the lines at the Eiffel Tower were really bad even at this time of year so I bought advance tickets online before we left the U.S. I wanted to be in the observation decks both in the daylight and at night so I got our tickets for 6:00 p.m. We had several hours before then and even though we woke up early to catch our flight, we headed straight out on the Metro for St. Louis Island – the center of Paris. We had hoped to go inside Notre-Dame Cathedral but it was Good Friday and they were only letting people in to attend mass. Our pass included admission to the roof of the cathedral and was supposed to get us around the line but the line was a mile long and the sign said they weren’t letting anyone cut to the front. I guess we missed meeting the hunchback.

After a lot of walking, a Metro ride and some more walking, we made our way to the Eiffel Tower and got in line at our assigned time. There was one problem – one of the elevators was broke and we ended up waiting in line for 90 minutes before entering the elevator. There were hundreds of people in line and every once in awhile, a tour group with restaurant reservations would cut in front of everyone causing some people to get really upset. We finally got to the lower observation deck and got in another line (only 20 minutes!) to get on the elevator to the top observation deck. Once we got there, I would have to say the view made it all worthwhile!

We spent quite a bit of time taking it all in from both decks in daylight and at night. It rained off and on but that didn’t spoil our view. We also stopped at the snack bar in the lower observation deck and had one of those funny French hot dogs. I was so enamored with Gustave Eiffel’s engineering marvel completed in 1889, that I read a book about it after I returned home.

During the next three days, we visited as many sites as possible without rushing too much. We used our Museum passes for many but found out that some of the sites or activities we planned to use the passes for such as a tour of the opera building and a Seine River cruise were not covered by our passes but by a different pass.

While out and about, we walked by the controversial Pompidou Centre where some street performers were doing a show, I got a T-shirt at the Hard Rock Café to add to my collection, we ate at Italian and Mexican restaurants and even had French cuisine.

When I was stationed in the Air Force in Germany, I took an Art History class and our class went on a field trip to the Louvre. That was actually my second trip to Paris (and the Louvre) in two months and I probably still didn’t see all of one of the greatest art museums in the world. Kathy was more interested in seeing the Musee D’Orsay than the Louvre so we just spent a few hours in the Louvre seeing the “must see” pieces like the Mona Lisa, Winged Nike and Venus de Milo as well as quite a bit of the rest of the collection.

After lunch in the Louvre Café, we headed straight to the Musée d’Orsay. This museum didn’t exist when I was there before. The museum is located inside an old train station that was completely renovated and now houses a huge collection of Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist art. This is one time when our passes actually got us past the line waiting to get in. Kathy was happy to see many works of her favorite artist Claude Monet here, and I thought it was a great museum overall – big but not overwhelming and very well organized.

After the Musée d’Orsay, we walked over to the Place de la Concorde, a huge square covering 20 acres with a 3,200-year old Egyptian obelisk standing in the middle. This obelisk is the twin of the obelisk we saw a few years earlier in Luxor, Egypt. It had been brought (stolen?) to Paris in the 19th century, somehow without being cracked or broken. When it was known as the Place de la Revolution, 1,119 people were put to death here by the guillotine in two and a half years. Those executed included Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and revolutionary leaders Danton and Robespierre.

We then took the Metro to the Arc de Triomphe. When we got there, we found another mob scene with a long line but our passes got us in fairly quickly. We climbed the 278 steps to the roof and again, the view made the hassle worth it. After some time soaking in the view from the Arc de Triomphe roof, we got back down and walked a few blocks up the Champs-Elysées where we found a nice French restaurant for dinner.

We saw the Musee l’Orangerie which is home to several of Monet’s large “Waterlillies” panels exhibited in an oval-shaped room (the panels are all curved). We also visited the Panthéon, a large former church which now contains the tombs of many notable French citizens such as Voltaire, Pierre and Marie Curie and Victor Hugo in the underground crypt. I had not seen either of these places on my previous trips.

The first several days, it rained off and on or was overcast. On one particularly dreary morning, we took the Metro to the Pere-Lachaise cemetery to see Jim Morrison’s grave. We had a grave location map but the old historic cemetery can still be easy to get lost in. We found Jim’s grave fairly easily and were happy to see that most of the graffiti from “fans” had been cleaned away. We also found the graves of Chopin, Ingres, Oscar Wilde and Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein (buried together). There were several cats running around guarding the graves too.

From Pere-Lachaise, we took the Metro to a train station where we boarded a train for a 10 mile (16 km) ride to the Palace of Versailles. To say this palace is ornate would be an understatement. Louis XIV hired one flamboyant interior decorator (Charles Le Brun) for this crib! The crowds were huge but we managed to make our way through most of the rooms on a self-guided tour.

When I saw Versailles 34 years ago, I remember the gardens were worth seeing. Our passes got us admission inside the palace but didn’t cover admission to the gardens and fountain show. We decided to pay and see those and shortly after we entered the huge gardens, a torrential rain began followed by hail. We had our umbrellas but still got very wet while trying to find shelter. After awhile, the rain and hail subsided and we walked around. The gardens were kind of dreary and I remember them being much nicer in the summer. The fountain show with music was OK but not really worth the eight Euro price of admission.

We also went back to the Notre-Dame Cathedral. This incredible Gothic masterpiece took 170 years to build and was completed around 1330. The line was fairly long but moved pretty fast (20 minutes) so we were able to go in and see the interior of this magnificent cathedral. At one point the people not there to pray were getting too loud and we heard a loud “SHHHH” come over the PA system. That shut everyone up fast…the voice of God will do that!

I was also hoping to see the famous 50 feet (15m) high stained-glass windows of the nearby Saint-Chapelle built in 1248 to house Christ’s Crown of Thorns (since moved to Notre-Dame) again, but the line to get in was pretty long. After all the walking and stair climbing we had done by then, we passed on that.

On our last full day in Paris, the sun came out and we took the Metro out to La Défense. This is the modern part of the city and is a whole different world from the medieval city center. I’m into all types of architecture and one building there stands out in particular. It’s called La Grand Arche. It’s an enormous hollow cube large enough to contain the Notre-Dame Cathedral - a most unusual building. This part of Paris was almost deserted and I finally realized that the day after Easter is a holiday there.

On our last full day in France, Kathy and I split up. No, we didn’t have a fight; we had pre-planned two different trips suited to our own interests.

I got up at 5:00 a.m., took the Metro to the Gare Saint-Lazare train station and took the train 145 miles (234 km) to Caen, a large town near the Normandy coast. At the Caen train station, I was met by Rosine, a tour guide who took me and five other people on a tour of Normandy’s World War II sites. I’m a history buff and was excited to see the site of the largest ever military landing and one of the greatest World War II battles in the European theater.

The tour included the Caen Museum/Memorial, lunch, the American Military Cemetery, Gold Beach, the remains of the artificial harbor at Arromanches, Omaha Beach, the German gun batteries at Longues-sur-Mer and Pointe du Hoc where the American Army Rangers scaled the cliffs under relentless fire from the German defenders. I could have skipped the museum as I already knew most of the history and spent more time at the actual sites. I would have also liked to have visited the German cemetery.

Rosine pointed out some hedgerows as we passed them. In 1944, the hedgerows there really slowed down the Allied advancement until a soldier invented a device installed on the front of tanks that allowed them to plow through.

I was expecting the weather to be very cold, cloudy and windy in Normandy but it was actually sunny and fairly warm – much nicer than Paris. I was able to walk out on the now pristine Omaha Beach where the Americans landed 66 years earlier. It’s so peaceful now that it’s hard to imagine the horrible battle that happened right where I was walking.

By the time I got back to our hotel room in Paris at shortly before 11 p.m., this had been my “Longest Day” and we had a 6:30 wake up call to depart for the airport the next morning. I didn’t mind the grueling schedule as the Normandy tour was the highlight of our France trip for me! In fact when I got home, I was compelled to watch the movie “The Longest Day” again. It has some really realistic battle scenes filmed before the advent of Computer-generated Imagery.

While I was touring Normandy, Kathy took a tour to Giverny, a town on the Seine River 42 miles (69 km) from Paris. Kathy was just as excited about seeing Claude Monet’s home and garden there as I was about seeing Normandy. Even though it was early spring, there were many flowers blooming in the garden there (but not the famous water lilies that Monet painted) and Kathy got to walk over the foot bridge that appears in several of Monet’s paintings. Since Giverny was a half day tour, Kathy had time to see the Rodin museum in Paris first and enjoyed seeing “The Thinker”, “The Kiss” and his other sculptures and house also.

I have heard from many Americans who have been to France that the French were rude to them. We didn’t really find this to be true. I tried to learn a few words of French and found the people we dealt with usually greeted us with a friendly “bonjour”. The guys at the hotel helped us find places on the map with their limited English. Kathy even had a man (I’m assuming he was French) grab and carry her suitcase when he saw she was struggling with it while climbing stairs in the Metro station. The people in the Information booths we encountered were courteous and helpful. We did run into one guy who was kind of like a maître d’ at a sidewalk café with a little bit of an attitude but he did take our photo when I asked him to.

Finally, it was time to say “au revoir” to Paris and France and there was no way we were going to haul our bags on the train and Metro to the airport. The taxi ride to the airport cost 50 Euros including tip and was worth every cent!

If you really wanted to see most of the sites in Paris as well as relax at outdoor cafés, take a Seine River cruise, see a show at the Moulin Rouge or Folies Bergère or just walk around taking in all the scenery, you would probably need at least two weeks. We managed to see quite a lot in our five days there going at our usual non-stop pace. We figure we can always rest when we get home.

With so many new places I still want to see, I rarely go back to places I’ve already been to. On my previous trips to France, I had seen many other Paris sites, museums, etc. and done most of the things we did on this trip (Normandy being a major exception). Having said all that, I believe Paris is still definitely a city worth going back to. And since Paris is one of the most romantic cities in the world, it was especially nice seeing it with Kathy!

To view a slideshow (can be paused) of 46 photos from this trip, click here: France photos.

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