Paris

Marty and I are fortunate that both of our parents and some of our siblings have been here recently, because it's made deciding what to do/see much easier. My parents recommended using the "Get Your Guide" app, and Marty's parents recommended taking a bike tour so we combined the two and scheduled a tour of Paris through the app.

It was amazing. When we come back (when not if haha), we will be doing a bike tour again. It was so fun and such a good way to see the city. We also had a great guide who taught us lots of interesting things. We just so happened to be the only people who scheduled the tour during our time slot, and our tour guide was training someone, so basically Marty and I each had a tour guide each to ourselves.

Bonus of our bike tour--we got all these pictures of us in front of cool places! 
I learned that Notre Dame means "Our Lady." This is a church for virgin Mary. 

The Eiffel Tower was built for the world fair, and originally Parisians hated it. But over time it became a symbol of Paris and now they like it.

Alexander III bridge--aka the most beautiful bridge in Paris.

This obelisk was a gift to France from Egypt. They originally gifted France 2 obelisks, but this one was such a pain to transport and set it up, that France just let Egypt keep the other one.

Us by Louvre entrance.

I love seeing signs of the Paris Olympics coming up.

After our tour we headed to lunch at this pizza place our guides recommended. The style of the pizza was from Northern France and it was really yummy!

Then we headed to the Musee D'orsay. It was worth it to go to the museum just to see "The Starry Night Over the Rhone." The paint was almost reflective and there was so much texture. We didn't get an audio tour for this museum, because we figured we'd just read the blurbs next to the paintings, but most of them were in French. In hindsight, I think it'd be worth it to have the audio tour.

I also loved this painting of Monet's.

Isn't this art so random and interesting? It makes a QR code.

We went the "Le Precope" for dinner. It's the oldest cafe in Paris, and has a fun vibe to it. One of Napoleon's hats is on display there because apparently he ate there back in the day and went to pay for his meal but didn't have money with him, so he just paid with his hat. I thought it was fun to eat there! I would say I don't feel the need to go back, but I enjoyed trying it out.

After dinner, we headed back to the hotel to relax before going to the Eiffel Tower.

A month or so ago I went to get tickets for the Eiffel Tower on their website and they were sold out of the regular "summit" tickets. I was bummed, but figured the second floor tickets would be good too. I went back on the Eiffel Tower website again this week and they'd released more tickets to summit. So now we are going to the Eiffel Tower twice while we're here--today we went to the second floor, and Friday we'll be summiting.

On our way to the Eiffel Tower, we had a little incident. We didn't have our pictures on our Navigo passes, and so they fined us 70 euro:( That feeling of getting in trouble rushed over me, and I did not like it.haha.  We learned our lesson--make sure you get the passport picture for your Navigo pass day 1. They have a bunch of places you can get them at the train stations, we just weren't thinking!

After our incident we made it to the tower and took the elevator to the second floor. My hands were so sweaty, and I was wondering why I had just bought tickets to come back and do this again. haha. But it was a cool view! Marty and I were pretty trashed at this point after a very long, very full day. So after we saw the tower (which is amazing. And I love when it sparkles), we went right back to our hotel and went to bed.