Bright and early Saturday morning, we packed up and said goodbye to London, headed for the St. Pancreas train station not far from our hotel. It worked out well that we were traveling on a Saturday because the Underground wasn't nearly as crowded which helps when you have big ol' suitcases. Here we are waiting to be called to the platform.
Ready to go! The Eurostar, which was the train we took, leaves from London, goes under the English channel, and comes up in the middle of Paris. It runs at about 190 miles per hour, though it never felt that fast. It holds the record for having the longest underwater tunnel in the world. And you wouldn't even know it. One second your in the daylight and the next, it's dark. You can't even tell you are descending and about 20-30 minutes later, you're back out in the light. Taking the Eurostar shaved hours off of our travel. Any other way you take from London to Paris takes FAR longer. We paid $60 each, one way for our tickets...well worth the money.
Upon arriving at the Gare du Noir train station in Paris, we were immediately smacked in the face with the reality that we were in a country where English wasn't spoken. It was a little unnerving, but we are adventurous and ready to go. Worst case scenario, we'd only have to starve for about 4 days and you can still live even without food for four days. Ha! Although a taxi would have been a much easier form of transportation from the station, we decided to dive in head first to the Paris Metro and took it all the way to our hotel in the Latin Quarter. Unless you've been to Paris you can not truly appreciate just how much work this involved, but we were determined to not shy away from jumping right into the public transportation system...and saving a TON of money by avoiding a taxi!
After all that work, we were rewarded with a little piece of heaven smack dab in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Upon walking through a huge wall with a door in it, this was the courtyard view of our hotel, The Hotel de Grande Ecole. The picture below is looking back toward the street and door we came in.
We were given our keys and headed to the elevator. When the doors to the elevator opened, it was so tiny that we could only go up one at a time with one bag. With no bags, two people were very much in each other's personal space!
And here was our room, room 109. We had a corner room with two windows, both with serene views.
This was the view from the window beside the bed.
And this was the view if you were laying on the bed looking towards straigh ahead. I loved this view!
Regardless of how things went in Paris, our hotel was perfect!
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