After being under the planning and protection of Viking for about two weeks, this was the day we were making our own way. We wanted to visit the Eiffel Tower, have a cruise along the Seine and tour the Louvre in one day!

The river cruise was easy to book but both the Louvre and Eiffel Tower took planning months in advance. The Louvre wasn’t bad.

However, the Eiffel Tower was a different story! I knew the exact day and middle of the night point in time that I needed to be online to get the earliest possible Eiffel Tower tour that allowed us to go to the top on September 10. Despite being ready, those tickets were gone in a flash. The best I could do was a bit later in the morning while paying for the most expensive “champagne included” tickets!

Perhaps that fits with the Eiffel Tower status of being the most visited paid entrance monument in the world!

As our Uber driver tried to get us close to the tower he found that roads were closed.  There was a very large Women’s 10K race being conducted in the area around the tower on the day of our visit. 

Thankfully there was a tall landmark we could walk towards! We eventually made it to a ticket line for those with advanced purchase tickets.

We learned the tower was planned for the 1889 World’s Fair, a date marking  the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution.

A design competition was launched in 1886 and Gustav Eiffel won by saying he could pay to get it built if he got the concession proceeds for a period of time.  (The cost was recouped in a very short time and then he made a lot of profit for many years.)

Digging began in January 1887 and construction of the tower was finished in March 1889.  It took only two years, two months and five days!

The resulting Eiffel tower was the tallest in the world at the time.  It measured 280 meters tall, the height of an 81 story building.

It was eclipsed by the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930.  The city added a transmitter tower in 1957 to gain the top spot once again at 330 meters.  After all this time it is still the second tallest building in France.

Parisians didn’t like the tower originally but grew to embrace it.  The lifts were a novelty. 

We certainly enjoyed both lifts – the first took us to the very busy second level where there were restaurants and shops.

The second lift took us all the way to the summit where there was an observation deck.

It was at the top that we had our champagne served in “fancy” plastic flutes!

We saw views of Paris everywhere we looked!

We saw evidence of preparation for the 2024 Olympics to be hosted in Paris.

The tower has 7,000,000 visitors per year and has become a globally recognizable icon of Paris.  The city of Paris now owns the concession. 

Fortunately our Seine River Cruise embarkation point was nearby – but that didn’t mean it was easy to get to given the fencing and barricades erected for the race.

We got there, boarded the boat and enjoyed the narration along the river.

We saw some fancy bridges!

These are part of a Russian Orthodox Spiritual and Cultural Center.

The obelisk in the distance is in honor for the work of Jean-Francois Champollion. He cracked the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone in 1822. 

In thanks, the sultan of Egypt offered Paris the diplomatic gift of two ancient Egyptian obelisks from the Luxor temple in 1830.  Getting the first one to and erected in Paris took years of effort and misadventures.  It was finally accomplished in 1836. The second obelisk was never picked up and “returned” to Egypt in 1981.

We saw Notre Dame again, this time from the river.

We had not been able to see this side of the repair work on Notre Dame from land.

More of the sights along the Seine River, Paris France!

We had one more view of the Eiffel Tower – this time from the river.

We disembarked and then had a terrible time getting an Uber to pick us up to take us to the Louvre. We were on a schedule needing to be there for our timed entry ticket purchased months in advance.  We had to navigate the competing thoughts of ‘we need to keep moving in case no one ever comes to get us’ and ‘we have to be willing to wait for a driver.”

Finally, after racing across the street, and getting a bit of a lecture about DON’T MOVE (even if the app tells you to) we were in a vehicle and on our way to the Louvre.

We made it to our final destination of the day, the Louvre Museum. It was still hot but we knew it would be air conditioned inside! 

We had booked a private guided tour for the Louvre because we didn’t have enough time in Paris to spend an entire day wandering around looking for the Mona Lisa and whatever else we might happen upon.

We met our guide and followed her lead. She took us first to the lower levels to see the foundations of the building from when this was the royal palace.

We were there – in the moat!

We saw some of the ancient Egyptian collection.

Our guide was very knowledgeable and always had us looking at details.

She had us notice how the artist was able to make the stone look like it was draping fabric.

This” stone fabric” has the illusion of transparency.

We saw a couple works that we recognized like the Nike (of Samothrace)…

and the Venus de Milo.

Then she led us to many paintings that we knew nothing about.  

Our guide’s passion seemed to be these lesser known paintings, their secrets, and how the artists created them.

Our guide expressed frustration that one of an artist’s paintings might be more famous than another when the second was more worthy. She put the Mona Lisa in the category of being the most famous but not DaVinci’s best work.

After 90 minutes, our guide escorted us to the line to view the Mona Lisa and was gone. 

  As you can see there was quite the crowd gathered to see the small painting of Mona Lisa.  

We got close enough to use the zoom feature on our cameras and called it good.

I have mixed feelings about our experience using the personal guide. On the positive side she was extremely knowledgeable and we saw, and partially understood, way more than we would have on our own no matter how long we might have wandered. On the negative side, we saw what she wanted to show us. I can only assume she hit all the Louvre highlights. The thing that bothered me is that she never asked us what we wanted to see – even though we probably wouldn’t have known what to say had she asked.

We wandered a bit more on our own.

I saw this painting by Rafael that seemed familiar even though I know almost nothing about art.

In the end we felt good that our full and busy itinerary for the day had been accomplished successfully and very much enjoyed. 

However, there is an exception – except for Uber! We still had one more frustrating attempt to get an Uber driver to take us back to the hotel. It was painfully slow but eventually accomplished. If you are wondering why we didn’t get a taxi, there weren’t any of those either.  I don’t know if transportation issues are the norm or if was just a very busy few days in Paris.

Connie and Warren still had the energy to do one more Viking tour called Paris by Night.  They were able to see the Eiffel Tower sparkle! We were sorry to have missed it, but not sorry enough to wish we had gone!

We were busy in Paris on September 10, 2023.

Next up:  Some of us go to Normandy.