We'd driven through
the old town of Beaune the night before, so decided to miss the wine
tasting that had been organised (not a good idea with the drive we had to
do anyway). A quick shot of some of the Minis
in the hotel car park taken from our bedroom window, and we were on our
way. We took the direct route from Beaune to Paris as we wanted as
much time as we could sightseeing as Rich had never been there before.
That meant we saw quite a few
other Minis en-route, so Kaz took some pics leaning out of Sput's window,
resulting in an impressive bad hair moment!
A stop at a motorway services
just before Paris saw Max dozing in the back of Jojo, but luckily she woke
up in time to do some souvenir shopping - we got some great bargains
there, including fibre optic Christmas tree each for Baby and Twinkle and
a silver Mini watch on a keyring for me.
The next stage of
the journey was hilarious, as we'd left our instructions on how to find
the hotel behind in Beaune, and on looking for them all we could find were
the instructions for Turin. Hence the conversations on the
walkie-talkies were continually along the lines of 'if you look on the
left you'll see a church... with the steps... that the Minis ran down in
the film'. Eventually after battling with the traffic on the Paris
Perifereque, we managed to find the Novotel Eiffel Tower.
We checked into the hotel and
found our rooms on the 20th floor!
The view from our bedroom window was sensational!
After a quick snack we headed for the Eiffel
Tower. Karen, Christian and Andy decided not to go up, leaving me in
charge of Max and Rich, who were decidedly wobbly about the whole
thing. Once they were at the top they were fine and really enjoyed
it. I'd done it a couple of times before, but never had such
fantastic weather for it, you could see for miles. At the top it was
really windy one side, but perfectly calm the other, incredible!
After coming down
from the Tower we walked along the bank of the Seine to meet the others,
but couldn't resist taking some more photos as darkness crept in.
Once we'd met up
with the others, we ambled down the Champs Elysee, looking in the
shops. We found a nice little restaurant just off of the Champs
Elysee for dinner, and then made our way back to the hotel. Couldn't
resist taking some more pics of the Eiffel tower on the way, especially
when it burst into sparkly lights at the turn of the hour. After a
quick drink in the hotel bar (we couldn't afford to stay there any
longer), we retired for an early night, after taking another pic from our
bedroom window of Paris by night.
