Day 3: London to Paris

White Cliffs of Dover
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I wake up and immediately panic as it’s fairly bright out. We must have slept in! But I check my watch and discover that no, it’s not quite 5:30 yet. We slowly get moving and repacking our stuff – it is fairly evident that my luggage capacity isn’t quite enough, and I decide I need a new, bigger backpack. I manage to unload my shoes on Jeff as he has lots of room so that saves some space. My shampoo bottle is already cracked and leaking, so I pilfer the room’s garbage bag and wrap the bottle in it.

Leaving the Port at Dover
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We head down for a breakfast of corn flakes and toast before checking out of our room. It’s a madhouse as there are about 4 TopDeck tours departing and people are everywhere. We get sorted by 6:45 or so and check in with our tour leader, Tori. We end up being the last group to head out due to our bus being stuck in traffic but we are on the road a bit after 7. Jeff assesses the group and says the “ratio” is about 65-35, which makes him happy. Tori comes around the bus and collects our passport and travel insurance info and chats with everybody a bit. We have about a 3 hour drive to Dover, and once we are out of London, the countryside isn’t all that exciting, so I doze off.

Jeff tells the waiter “C’est magnifique” on the way out…who says we don’t know French?

Sacred Heart Basillica on Montmartre
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Arriving at Dover, we get our passports stamped and get onto the 10:50 ferry to Calais. Tori sets us loose on the ship and lets us know where to meet when we arrive in an hour and a bit. We hang out on the (very windy) deck for a while and then go below to grab some lunch. Lamar, the South African on the trip, hangs out with us for a while as he is traveling alone, but runs into a friend of his on the boat (on another tour) and ditches us. Fair enough. We get the wonderfully greasy “Farmhouse Breakfast”, which Jeff suspects is what made him sick later on.

Sacred Heart Basillica
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We get to Calais about 1:00 France time (an hour ahead of the UK), and meet our real bus (the previous one was just a temp to Dover), as well as Ben and PJ, the rest of our crew. Ben will be our “on-road chef”, handling all matters of food, and PJ will be skillfully driving us around Europe. Ting, Jeff and I “supervise” the loading of our baggage onto the bus, and then we are off, enjoying the air conditioning. There is lots of room on the bus, as 8 people are joining the tour in Paris (making 39 total). After some introductory talk from our crew, the music is turned on and we settle in for the 4 hour trip to Paris.

View of Paris from Montmartre
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I determine the French countryside to also not be that interesting, and spend the bus trip napping and chatting with a couple people. All 3 of us sign up for the optional cabaret the next night…turns out it is just us, Angie and Tori who go – everyone else opts for the (much cheaper) Seine River cruise.

As we reach Paris, Tori hands out our maps and info sheets (the first of many -  we get them for each city), and gives a quick primer on the French language, as well as a talk on the history and culture of France (also standard for each place we visit). We arrive at the Sovereign Hotel around 5:30. There are 4 people to a room so Lamar decides to room with us. The room itself can best be described as…small. It’s essentially 4 beds right next to each other that span almost the entire length of the room, and a tiny bathroom with a hand-held shower. Very Europe!

The famous Moulin Rouge
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We’re heading out to Montmartre at 7 to get dinner, so we clean up a bit and then go for a walk. As it turns out, our hotel is nowhere near anything, so we don’t really discover anything cool (mainly a canal on one side of the road and a wall on the other). Back at the hotel, I try a Lette (a very light beer) before the bus shows up, and it’s not bad. Once on the bus, we pass through what Tori describes as the “Red Light District” of Paris, where we see the famous Moulin Rouge and well as the awesomely named “Sexodrome”. Ting and Jeff nod off on the short trip but I manage to stay awake.

Eiffel Tower at Night
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We hop off the bus and hike up a bunch of stairs to the Sacred Heart Basillica, which sits on the hill Montmartre, up above the city. We are warned about “string men” who put string bracelets on you and then try to charge large amounts of money for them. Just say “non, merci” and keep walking.  Once on top, we get a great view of the city, and are given about an hour to look around and get some dinner. There are lots of people just hanging out on the steps on the church, several drinking, and a couple guys have a boom box going.  Good hangout I guess. We take a spin through the church (the first of MANY churches this trip) and then head to small café to get some crepes. My crepe is ham and cheese – a combination that is EVERYWHERE in France. The food is excellent, but soft drinks are 4 Euro apiece, almost as much as the food! This seems to be a trend in Europe…drinks are really expensive, close to the price of alcoholic ones. Might as well have a real drink then! Jeff tells the waiter “C’est magnifique” on the way out…who says we don’t know French?

Insane traffic around the Arc de Triomphe
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After we meet up with the group, Tori assigns us numbers so that we can count off and ensure everybody is with us. This last about 1 day, as we prove unable to handle this complicated concept, and she goes back to counting us herself. We weave through people back down the stairs, check out some break-dancers, and then hop back on the bus for our “City of Lights” tour, where we see many of Paris’s famous landmarks, many of them lit up as the night gets darker. We take a couple spins around the Arc de Triomphe to observe the absolutely INSANE traffic in the roundabout there (check out the photos). It’s an intersection of a bunch of major roads, and apparently there is an accident in the area every 8 minutes or so. Of course our big bus is just adding to the congestion for no real reason, other than to let us gawk out the windows and observe a couple “near misses”. Our crew plays “Let’s Get Retarded” (the first of many times this trip before the Black Eyed Peas were banned from the bus) as an appropriate soundtrack to the situation.

Paris Opera House
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We are all extremely tired, having been up since 5:30 and still not really recovered from the trip over , so we struggle to stay awake (and don’t really succeed) as the tour goes on. The best sights are the Eiffel Tower lit up (it even sparkles on the hour) and the Opera House. We get back to the hotel just after 11. Jeff half-heartedly mentions visiting the bar, but I laugh at the absurd suggestion - despite the extreme heat in our room, we all pass out almost immediately. Jeff’s stomach is kind of bothering him – something didn’t sit well, but he hopes it’ll be better by tomorrow.