Tour Eiffel

When we started planning our  detailed itinerary for Paris sometime last week, the first item on the list was to go up the Eiffel Tower. ‘Good idea,’ I said, ‘it looks like we can walk up to the second level via the stairs, and it won’t even cost us very much.’  Nope, not good enough, Dad ... Both of the younger ladies in the household assured me that one has not been to Paris unless one has actually travelled to the very top of the Eiffel Tower (only accessible by lift). By the time we looked, only a single time slot (9:30am on Wednesday) was available, so we snapped it up.

It wa a pretty inconvenient time for us. It meant checking out of our AirBnB super-early and, since the stingy owners wouldn’t let us leave any luggage there, we had to travel across Paris in peak hour to store our bags at Gare de Lyon. Then we had to travel back across Paris in even peaker hour to get to the tower on time. This latter journey was interesting to say the least. The train on the platform was too full to get on. So was the next one. In the end, we played sardines on the 3rd train, which was no less full than the first two. To be honest, if we weren’t near the door I’m not sure how we would have escaped from this train ... But, in the end, we got there, in time for a croissant and a coffee before we had to start queueing.

We have now come to accept that buying a ticket online before you get to your tourist site does not obviate the need to stand in queues. But, to our surprise, the queue at the entrance wasn’t too bad - only 15 minutes or so. We then discovered that was just the first security queue, there was another queue to get to a second security check which allowed us to then queue to hand over our ticket. The good news was that we were then allowed to queue for the first lift to the second floor, which led directly to the queue for the lift to the top ...

The lift itself was kind of interesting — first it travelled at an oblique angle up one of the tower legs. Then it transitioned to vertical. There was some consternation about the safety of this contraption (to me it felt several orders of magnitude safer than the roller coaster we took on Sunday), but we all made it to the top without misadventure. Of course, the view is pretty decent ...

... we took a few obligatory selfies on the top ...

... and eventually made our way down.

Once we emerged, we had the best part of 3 hours to kill before our train. Not long enough to do anything particularly interesting, but long enough to get bored ... we elected for a walk around the city, catching occasional glimpses of our tower as we wandered along the Seine. We found an Australian coffee shop, are some crumpets, drank coffee and finally headed back to the TGV for our express ride back to Grenoble. A successful trip, and nice to be back in our little flat by the river.