Thursday morning we were on the road by 10am to head back to the center of Paris to return our car...which I had been dreading cause I had no clue how we were going to find this garage we were supposed to return the car to. Hertz gave us a map, but it was so faded and looked like a photocopy made in 1983 that it was un-readable. So during most of the drive I'm trying to use our Garmin to locate the street marked on our map to return the car, but can't find the street anywhere. So we just have the Garmin lead us to the Louvre and then figure we'll be able to locate the garage....BIG MISTAKE. I seriously was fighting back tears once in Paris cause we were circling the Louvre area for a solid 45 minutes unable to find the garage...there is no place to pull over....all of the streets are 1-way and jammed packed, so you can't just easily circle the block. So we finally find the street and need to make a left, but when we go to turn left all of the cars on the street we are turning onto are facing us. So I scream out cause it's obviously a 1-way street. So Dustin starts to just make a U-turn and then somehow Dustin realized that for this 1 street only, you drive on the LEFT side of the street...so he quickly whips into the left lane. This leads us to a garage, but the garage has several options of where to go, so Dustin picks the down ramp. We go waaaaaaay down and then you are to take a ticket and the gate will rise up, but I look around and notice our Mini Cooper is out of place amongst 100% BUSES down here...we managed to find the Louvre Bus Parking!!!! So dustin decides to floor it and drive in reverse up the ramp to back out of here...but a humongo bus comes around the corner, nearly hits us, and now we are pinned into this ramp. So we have to take a ticket and enter this parking area. I tell Dustin to just park in a spot, stay with the car, and I will walk and find Hertz and make the worker come with me and take the car to the garage or I need specific directions. Luckily the guy at Hertz was nice and spoke decent english, so we just had to take a different ramp and go upstairs to return the car. So had to sit in line for 30 minutes to get out of the garage in this line of buses. By now, we are over an hours past the time the car was due and sucked up a ton of gas from our "full" tank. But we eventually got the car back and then were on our way via metro to our hotel.
We saved A TON of money on our hotel by picking one that wasn't right in the heart of everything and we really liked it. It was called Hotel Home Moderne. It was a good 10-15 walk to the metro, but most days we really enjoyed this and would stop at stores along the way.
After dropping off our stuff we did the Rick Steves Left Bank Walk. Although on our walk to the Metro it starts POURING rain, so we had to duck inside a bar and grab a drink and wait. The left bank is just the name of the area south of the Seine River. We started with Luxembourg Garden, which was just beautiful...seriously was like the best park I had ever seen! It is 60 acres and has special rules about where you can play cards, jog, have your pets, etc.
We then went to St. Sulpice, if you read the Da Vinci code you may remember this from there. It had 3 large Delacroix murals- the most famous is Jacob Wrestling the Angel. The thing I thought was cool was an egyptian-style obelisk that works like part of a sundial. At xmas mass, the sun shines though this tiny hole and strikes a mark on the obelisk that indicates winter solstice. Then week after week, the sunbeam moves down the obelisk and across this bronze rod on the floor until the sun lights the altar during midsummer. Just seemed pretty ingenious, especially when all this stuff was built so long ago! Unfortunately I wasn't smart enough to take a pic of the obelisk.
We walked around to just view some stores and restuarants. We saw Cafe Procope where Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had ate at. Napoleon also supposedly ate there frequently, but would never pay his bill. We stopped for a drink and eats at Les Deux Magots where Ernest Hemingway frequented. It was expensive and food was just so-so. Notice how you sit next to people, not across...so everyone faces out to the street to peoplewatch...this is how all european places are!
Next was St. Germain-des-Pres, the oldest church in Paris dating back to 11th century! The inside was still painted in medievil style.
We ended our offical walk just south of the Seine of the Louvre...so we decided to just keep walking along the Seine towards the Eiffel tower. It didn't look that far, but it was quite the walk! About a block away, rain starts, so we walk a little faster. Starts raining harder, so now we go under a tree to try and stay dry. Um, not working and getting soaked. So we decide at this point we may as well just get wet and run the rest of the way to the Eiffel Tower and hopefully it is somewhat covered underneath there. Well, it wasn't 100% dry, but it was our best option! So we just stand there forever waiting for it to stop, which it finally does...but wasn't like we were going to go sit on a bench or the grass now and lounge about like we planned! So we took a couple pics and then headed home!
