Day 84 = March 28

Saturday we headed out of Leiden.  Mom and Tam went back to London to catch their flight and Amanda and I went to Paris.  One the train ride to Brussels, there was engineering work going on so we had to take a bus between two of the station.  We thought that mom and Tam were going to miss there train back to London.  But we made it with about 30 minutes to spare. Amanda and I then walked around the train station and headed to our train platform.  When we got there we found out that we needed to have a seat reserved.  So we had to go get that figured out so we could make it to Paris.  When we finally got to Paris, it took us about a 30 minute walk to get to our hostel, and it was all up hill. 

Come to find out that our hostel is located close to the highest point in Paris. We got checked in and we got to room which was on the top floor with one really cool view of the city.  It did not look toward the tower but it was still cool.  After we got checked in, we headed for the Eiffel Tower.  We started walking and then it started to rain, so we got on the subway and rode the rest of the way to the tower.  Come to find out we were a long ways away from the tower and it would have taken a long time to walk all the way down there.  We got down to the tower and found it and were starting to take pictures of it when the lights went out on it.  Don't know why but we had only seen it for about 5 minutes when this happened.  We walked toward it for a little while and the lights came back on.  We slowly walk toward the tower taking pictures on the way.  We decided that we wanted to go the tower so we did. It was really cool.  We could see a long ways but you could not see the end of the city lights. They kept going as far as we could see.  One thing that Amanda did not like was going up the elevator from the ground floor to the second floor.  It was different.  It had glass windows and you could see out as we went.  Then at the top, around the outside of the room there were little flag telling you how far away different cities in the world and what direction they were.  They had DC and LA and it was interesting how far apart they were.  Also at the top there was an apartment built where the designer of the tower had a place to invite people over and they could stay at the top of the tower for a night.  After we got done with the tower we went back toward our hostel.  We rode the metro most of the way.  When we got there we walked to the top of the hill so we could watch the tower sparkle for five minutes after the hour.  That was cool.  When that was done we went back to the hostel and went to bed. 

Rick