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Paris Itinerary

I’m off to Paris tomorrow morning and although I realise the danger in attempting to plan my trip too thoroughly (after all, Paris is probably one of the best places for wandering around without a set plan) I wanted to make sure I had organised my trip to a certain degree. This is Paris in six days (without going in-Seine…). I’ve include the estimated costs of each day and activity in case anyone else is thinking about planning a trip and might find this useful!

Day 1 – Monday

I leave London at 10:30am and arrive at the Paris Nord train station around 1:30pm. When I arrive I’ll buy un billet of metro passes (that’s 10 for 11.50) for the week. From the train station I will head directly to my hotel to drop off my stuff and check in. I’m staying at the Hotel des Arts, Bastille, a budget hotel a little ways out of the city centre but I’ll have my own room and bathroom.

Once at the hotel, my plan is to walk the 6km across Paris, along the Seine, to the Rodin museum. I’ve heard wonderful things about the museum which offers young person entry for 4. That should take me to early evening and I’ll grab a quick dinner (7-10) after the museum. The plan is to check the availability and pricing of a cruise down the Seine and book it for either Monday or Tuesday night. I’ll then take the metro back to the hotel for an early night.

Total cost for the day: ~€22 (not including Eurostar ticket and hotel)

Day 2 – Tuesday

Early start today for a Paris by Bike tour (23) which will last from 10am-1:30pm. The English guided tour takes you through many of the most popular areas of the city and gives you local history along the way.

The bike tour ends in front of the Notre Dame cathedral so I’ll take some photos but skip the queue in favour of heading across the river to queue for the Lourve (€9 or €6 after 6pm) for a quick look at one or two galleries, just to say I went in.

I’ll spend the afternoon in that area, probably also checking out Musée d’Orsay (5.50) and I might just go there instead depending on how crowded everything is. I’ll end with afternoon tea in Angelina’s (known for world famous hot chocolate, €10). If I didn’t do it the night before, I’ll do a Seine cruise on Tuesday.

Other food will probably be about €15-20 for the day.

Total cost for the day: ~€67

Day 3 – Wednesday

I’ll head out very early to beat the crowds for a trip up the Eiffel Tower (€12) and enjoy the view and some brunch from the top (€7). The midday plan is to follow the Tower tour with a trip to the Picasso Museum (€4) which houses many of his greatest works from throughout his lifetime.

For the afternoon, I’ve signed up for a market tour and French cooking class which will take 4-5 hours for a three course meal and tour through the markets (€70). I’m not sure I’ll get in, though, as I haven’t heard back from the booking agent so if not, I’ll wander the Montmartre area and swing by the Sacre Coeur and Champs-Élysées.

Total cost for the day: ~€90

Day 4 – Thursday
Off to Versailles!

Take the RER C to Versailles for a tour of the palace and gardens (I’ve heard rumours I can find a combination transport and admissions ‘Le Passport’ for €25 so I’ll look into that). Probably another €25-30 on food and souvenirs but I imagine this will be a full day trip.

Total cost for the day: ~€50

Day 5 – Friday
In the morning I’ll do the Catacombs Museum and Tour (€5). It’s supposed to be an amazing tour and it’ll give me an opportunity to see a new part of the city. In the afternoon, I’ll explore the neighbourhood of Montmartre if I didn’t get a chance to see it on Wednesday because I did the cooking course instead.
This evening I’ll walk along the Seine and visit any other evening attractions I’ve discovered over the first couple of days to fully enjoy my last night in Paris!

Other food will probably be about €20-25 for the day.

Total cost for the day: ~€30

Day 6- Saturday

It’s my last day in Paris so I’ll start by swinging by the Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise (it’s 10 min from my hotel) and see the grave of Oscar Wilde, among other famous names. After my morning walk, I’ll gather my belongings and head back through Paris; by this point I’ll probably have found something I want to see again. One more Parisian breakfast and lunch and then I’ll make it back to Paris Nord by 1:45pm for my train back to London.

Total cost for the day: ~€15

So that, folks, is my week in Paris for under €285. Of course this doesn’t include the Eurostar ticket or the hotel, but those can vary so much that I’m sure you can sort those out yourself should you find yourself planning a trip to Paris.

Wow, it sounds so short now that I’ve planned it all out! I’ll try to find an internet cafe once or twice to update my blog and upload some pictures. Have a wonderful week!


Goodbye to Wales

My thought process this evening has gone something like this:

“I’m tired, I got back late, I should go to bed. Hmm, what’s this? I have no sheets on my bed? They’re still in the washer and we have no dryer? Wow, I guess I have more time than I thought while I wait for my bed to not be soaking wet. I guess I’ll finish my story of Wales on my blog.”

So here I am. I am quite knackered, though – between missing last Friday, last Monday and all of next week, I’m trying frantically to get everything up to speed at work. I knew I was going to be in the office late today so I offered to do the washing up (they always make the tea, and I never have to make the tea – it’s only fair when I’m around I do the dishes every so often!) and got so busy and distracted that I completely forgot I had offered and now I feel bad. This really has nothing to do with Wales. Point is, I’m distracted and tired so if this is more incoherent than usual that’s why.

On the morning of day three we all piled onto the bus for the last few stops. The schedule said that we were going to do more castles, but our guide Adam said that we had seen a lot of castles, and we’d see another before we left so he had a surprise that he thought we’d like better. As we left Abergavenny he explained that he was taking us to Pwll Mawr, or Big Pit, which was a museum dedicated to the mining history of South Wales. Like some parts of the US East Coast, South Wales saw a lot of towns grow out of the coal mining industry and thousands of men, women and children were employed in coal mines all over the country. Big Pit was once one of the largest working coal mines but has since been converted into a museum where you can don a helmet and lamp, climb into the cage and descend down the original 90metre mine shaft for an hour long tour through the mines led by a man who had worked in the mines while they were still active. It was absolutely amazing (and should you be thinking of heading to Wales yourself, it was, like many of the best museums in the UK, free) and so unique. It was hard to image that the tiny tunnels in which we found ourselves were home to 1300 men, as well as horses, dogs and children who helped out in the mines.

There were a number of other exhibits to see after the part of the tour in the mine finished but nothing really compared to being underground with one of the men who could speak firsthand about the experience. After Big Pit, we continued south towards Cardiff, although we didn’t actually go all the way to the country’s capital city (and important in my mind for its Doctor Who associations) because it would have been impossible to experience the city in an hour or less. Instead, we turned west before hitting the city and stopped at a place called Tintern Abbey which featured the ruins of Tintern Abbey, one of the Catholic structures that’s destruction was ordered by Henry VIII when he decided he wanted to start his own religion. It was clear that it had been a stunningly gorgeous building while at its height and even in ruins it was quite a sight.

We didn’t stay long although Adam suggested that we all do our kitschy Wales tourist shopping at the Tintern Abbey gift shop as it’d be the last one in which we stopped. I bought two little cookbooks of Welsh recipes including Welsh rarebit. Rarebit is compared by some to cheese on toast but is actually a cheesy bread baked with herbs and seasonings, and a variety of cheeses. It gets its name from when poor families couldn’t afford meat to feed the whole family and so when some meat was available, it was cooked into the bread, then the bread was chopped up and distributed to each member of the family. If you got the piece with meat in it, then you got the rare bit of meat – thus the name rarebit although it’s not generally cooked with meat anymore.

After leaving Tintern Abbey we headed to our final stop in Wales at a place called Chepstow which was right on the border of England, just over the river. There was a bridge with a sign in the middle indicating where the border of the two countries lay.


Chepstow also had a gorgeous castle and I found a nice trail that went around the whole thing – it was a huge castle, bigger than any I’d seen so far on the trip and probably almost a quarter mile long. There were people in costume getting ready to do a mock battle in full armour and everything but unfortunately we couldn’t stay as it was time for us to go back to London.

It was such a wonderful trip and I can’t wait to go back to Wales to do some proper camping. Now that I know a number of the towns at different parts of the country, I can catch a train and make my way along the same route we traveled, although possibly at a more leisurely pace. I met some very nice people, got a ridiculous number of photos including a decent number with me in them (the nice thing about traveling with a group is you can ask people to take your picture everywhere!) and discovered that Wales is exactly as wonderful as I thought it would be.

Whew, I’m dead on my feet so it’s off to bed, damp sheets or not. Up next… Paris!


Da Ddau (Day Two)

Alright. Picking up where I left off with day two of my trip in Wales (that’s Sunday the 24th of August for anyone playing along at home). In the morning after our night in the hostel in Caernarfon I got up a bit early to take some pictures of the castle before we headed out for the day.


Unfortunately, it seemed that everyone in the British Isles (and most of mainland Europe) had decided Wales was the place to be for the holiday weekend and so the traffic was horrendous. This was made even worse by the fact that the main road through Northern and into Mid-Wales is a fairly narrow two lane road and we were a very big bus. There were some close calls (for the other drivers at least) but we somehow managed to make our way onward.

Our morning drive was through Snowdonia National Park which is home to Mount Snowdon, the second tallest mountain in the UK. It was absolutely gorgeous and had many high, rocky peaks that looked wonderful for climbing. We didn’t do much climbing as we were in a bus but we did stop to try to get a glimpse of Mount Snowdon, although it was being shy and hiding behind a lot of clouds. I definitely plan on going back to do some camping there, it looks exactly like you’d imagine a place called Snowdonia to look except there wasn’t any snow. It should have been called Cloudonia. That’s what it looked like. Cloudonia.

As we headed south, we passed through a town called Beddgelert (pronounced Beth-gelert and it means The Grave of Gelert) and although we didn’t stop, the name goes along with such a great legend I’ll give a quick recap:

The last Welsh Prince of Wales, before it was taken over by the English, was a man called Llywelyn (sounds a bit like chwell-en with a soft ch like in challah) the Last who was Prince until killed by Edward I in 1282. Before he was killed, he did quite a bit of fighting with Edward and his English armies and so was out of his home a lot. His wife had died and the one creature he trusted the most in overseeing the care of his infant son was his dog, Gelert. One day, he was away and Gelert was keeping watch in the nursery when a wolf entered the castle. Gelert, the dog, instinctively pulled the baby out of the crib and put him underneath, then covered him with a blanket and went off to find the wolf before it could enter the room. They met in the next room and a huge fight ensued. Gelert finally killed the wolf but was quite injured so limped back to the baby’s room where he collapsed. Llywelyn returned that evening and found Gelert, covered in blood, in a seemingly empty nursery and in rage and panic pulled out his sword and cut of Gelert’s head believing that Gelert had killed the baby. At the noise, the baby, still hidden, started crying and Llwelyn realized what he had done. Horrified and ashamed that he had killed Gelert, he picked up the body of the dog and carried it in his arms until he couldn’t go any further, and there stopped and buried the body. Around that grave eventually grew the town of Beddgelert, the Grave of Gelert. Although we didn’t stop, there is in fact a place where Gelert is supposed to be buried.

I really loved getting the Welsh stories from our guide and we heard so many. But even stories weren’t helping us from getting antsy as we had spent the whole morning on the bus so we were more than ready when we got to Harlech Castle for a walk about. Like the castle in Llangollen the day before, it was also on a peak, although not nearly as high as the castle Dainas Bran so the walk up was much more manageable for the group. Also, it overlooked the ocean which was pretty fantastic. Both Harlech and the castle in Caernarfon where we stayed the night before were Edwardian castles, built basically to intimidate the Welsh people that he had overtaken. They were meant to be impressive and complex enough to be defended by only a few men so it was quite a site up on top of the hill. I spent the full hour wandering around the castle, which dated from the 1300s and probably took way too many pictures but enjoyed it immensely.

In some of the innermost castle areas, they had set up some display boards with information about the castle and its history. Everything was written in both English and Welsh. Aside from being a wonderfully lyrical language, it’s beautiful to look at too – although it’s not really phonetic so it’s hard to guess at the pronunciation from the written words.

All too soon it was time to leave the castle. We stopped again briefly in a town called Dolgellau to grab some lunch but it was another long bus stretch as we made our way to the town of Hay-on-Wye, better known as the town of books. Hay-on-Wye has a local castle as well but the castle was purchased by a nobleman who was, shall we say, completely bonkers. He turned the castle into an antiques and second hand bookshop but upon realising that the antiques weren’t moving and the books were selling like hotcakes, he ditched the antiques and bought more books. And more books. And more books. Then another shop in the town to sell the books. And another. And some more books. Suddenly, someone realised that he was completely bankrupt and he lost everything because he had been buying the books for more than he was selling them.

Fortunately, his legacy lives on and Hay-on-Wye, with a population of about 1800 (that’s smaller than Colby!) has over 30 secondhand bookshops of varying specialties. There were secondhand gardening bookshops, secondhand cookbooks shops, bookshops where nothing was over a pound. The original castle, with its random assortment of books for sale, was still there with a garden full of books for 50p. We had gotten there rather late and a number of the shops were closing for the night so we only had about half an hour to look around. I got irrationally (well, I thought it was rational) angry with the whole town when I found a rare and first editions bookseller trying to sell a “full set” of Bronte novels for £250 but the set didn’t include one of Anne Bronte’s novels so was one short. I might have to go back and give Hay-on-Wye a second chance, though. It is after all the town of books and I really think that sounds like my sort of place.

It was quite late, then, when we got to Abergavenny, our home for the second night. We were staying in a hostel called The Black Sheep which was situated above a pub and after a quick walk through the town (which wasn’t just empty… it was absolutely barren. It was like a ghost town. Although it did look as though it would be very cute during the day) to grab some dinner, we all headed back to our own pub where the bartender, who also owned and lived in the pub and hostel, put on a quiz for us with free drinks as prizes. Our team tied for first place and I won another drink for being the first to know that “woman Hitler” is an anagram of “Mother in Law” so by the time the quiz finished I was relaxed enough to enjoy and even take part in the post-quiz karaoke (although I think the rest of the group wished they had had a bit more to drink!). We annoyed the neighbours until past 11pm when we all traipsed off to bed at the end of our second day in Wales.

Just one more installment of the Welsh Saga tomorrow! Hope you’re enjoying the story so far…


Wow. So… Wales.

I’m not sure I can possibly sum up the last three days in a single post but given that not too much is going to be happening this week, maybe I can break it up and do a post about the trip over the rest of the week. Lord knows I’d better get caught up before France or you’ll never hear about Wales. To start with, the Welsh call their country Cymru (pronounced coom-ree with enough of the ‘r’ rolled that sometimes it sounds a bit like coom-bree).

Wales was wonderful. It was everything I expected and more (and I had high expectations). There were castles and mountains and scenic drives and friendly people and cheap beer. It was beyond gorgeous. Wales is quite unique in that it has an absolutely stupendous array of landscapes even though it’s a fairly small country. It’s mountainous in some areas, costal, flat, forested, pastured, and more.

But before I get into the country let me say a bit about the trip I went on. Haggis Adventures runs trips all over the UK (most predominately Scotland, thus the name) and since this weekend was the Bank Holiday and I had Monday off, I booked this a while ago. It’s a coach bus trip and the best way to describe it (as put by my tour guide Adam) is that if Wales were a movie, the Haggis tour would be the trailer. I got a taste of Wales and have a little sense of what it’s about but really there’s a ton more to discover. We spent more time than I might have liked on the bus but I did manage to see a lot more of the country that I would have otherwise (like… the whole thing).

Tonight I’m absolutely knackered after the trip so I’ll just get started with day one… if I can stay awake for that much!

We headed out of London at about 7:30am Saturday morning (which meant I needed to leave my flat a little before 6am to make the bus) along with the rest of the holiday traffic which meant we traveled at a crawl out of the city (and pretty much for the rest of the weekend through any other city). I met up with the rest of my group which was a mixed bunch – we had a lot of Aussies and Indians, a handful of Americans (myself included), two from Korea, two from Brazil, one Kiwi, one German and some assorted Brits. I ended up chatting with Natalie (the German woman) and Abby (American) and later we connected with Mel (Kiwi) and two sisters Louisa and Gemma (Aussie). The six of us roomed together for the two nights… but I’m getting ahead of myself already.

Once out of London we headed for Stratford-Upon-Avon, the home of the one-and-only Shakespeare (who, incidentally, signed his name many different ways on the historical documents recovered from the time but never actually signed the way it’s spelled today. Funny, that). We, somewhat disappointingly, only had 40 minutes there – something that would be a trend for the rest of the trip – so I had to tell myself that I wasn’t actually there visiting, that I was just in a very nice town that happened to have a lot of Shakespeare stuff. I can’t wait to go back, though, the teaser of Stratford was enough to make me want to spend a full weekend there. I looked, but didn’t see David Tennant. Sadly. I did see Shakespeare’s house which is, to be fair, cooler as well as the pub where he was rumoured to have downed pints with his fellow actors after the plays. I enjoyed seeing the house in which Shakespeare grew up (I didn’t go in this time… next time I will) although I have heard it said that during the “preservation” of Shakesperian heritage, in their eagerness to make the area look nice and build a museum for which they could charge entry, they knocked down the wrong house – so what you actually visit is the house next to the house where Shakespeare grew up. Either way, it’s as close to genius as I’ve ever gotten.

After Stratford, we continued to head north towards Northern Wales. We learned quite a bit about Welsh history and legend from our tour guide who was incredible. The tour was worth it just for the local history he provided. Our first stop in Wales was a place called Llangollen (pronounced something like High-lock-len) where the ruins of a castle called Dainas Bran stood on a peak about 1000 metres above the town. We had the chance to walk up to the ruins which was amazing – it was a strenuous hike, very steep and ragged, but it was worth it when you got to the top and you could see miles and miles in every direction. I was glad to get the exercise too after sitting in the bus all morning. It was hard to imagine how the castle was originally built as it was hard enough to get myself up the hill without building supplies, but it was definitely a good location for the castle defenses – nothing beats that view!

After Llangollen we continued north towards the Isle of Anglesey which is a largish island off the coast of Northern Wales. We passed The Ugly House and because it’s such an interesting story, I’ll give a quick recap:

Lords of the land back in the 15th century taxed their tenants based on the size of their house and the number of houses on their plot of land. Therefore, if their children moved out to a new house on the land, they would pay twice as much in taxes. When the Welsh tenants complained, the landlord told them that if between the time he left when the sun went down and when he arrived in the morning, a fully built house with a fire burning in the hearth appeared, he wouldn’t tax them for the house. Of course he didn’t believe it was possible but the tenants gathered the materials during the day, and their friends at night, and roughly threw together a house, got the fire lit, and by morning got the house for free. The lack of precision and roughness of the materials and workmanship meant that the house was very basic and the walls jagged and protruding. Thus the name, The Ugly House. Few examples of these still exist in tact and we got to see one on the way to Anglesey.

We made a quick detour across the Menai Strait to Anglesey for the sole purpose of stopping at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch which is the longest place name in Europe (and the third longest in the world). The town has an official abbreviation but I got some great pictures of the entire town name on the train depot sign.

We then traveled to Caernarfon (something like can-off-ren) where we would be staying for the night. There was some amazingly rich history of the area, not much of it pleasant for the Welsh who were basically abused by the English from the 1280s onward, but there was a truly stunning castle built by Edward I of England in the late 1200s and the castle and most of the castle wall still stands today. Our hostel was just inside the castle walls and the entire castle was on the sea. We got fish and chips and walked along the sea wall before stopping in the local pub, again right on the water, in the shadow of the castle, for local beer and to overheard some Welsh.

I called it an early night as it had already been a long day, and was out like a light by 10:30pm.
…As I hope to be tonight! I’ll pick up with day two of Wales tomorrow hopefully. It really was a fantastic trip and I can’t wait to go back.


Wales!

Off to Wales… should be quite an adventure.