Eurostar to Paris!

Once again we were up at the crack of dawn! We had breakfast at the hotel and boarded the coach BEFORE 7:00! We had to be at St. Pancras Station by 9:00 in order to check in, go through security and get our luggage on board, which we did with time to spare. We had almost a whole train car to ourselves - pity the poor 'outsiders.' Mr. Bittante kept many people amused with a rousing game of 'Mafia' and quite frankly, I didn't even notice when we went under La Manche. Suddenly there was French countryside and announcements that we would be arriving in Paris shortly.

A coach picked us up outside the Gare du Nord and delivered us to the Hotel Mercure Val du Fontenay which is located just outside of Paris proper. It took less than an hour for us to go into central Paris arriving at Opera Station an hour before our scheduled tour time. This gave us a few minutes to check out the wonderful department store Galeries Lafayette.at 4:00 we started our tour of Opera Garnier which is the old opera house and also the setting of Phantom of the Opera. it seems that some of the phantom story is true: the building lay empty for several years during the Franco-Prussian War and during that time there were squatters living in the basement ( there are five floors below the stage), there was flooding in the basement but not a lake, there was a problem with the chandelier but it was the counterweight that fell not the chandelier. It seems that for years, the opera companies kept a box (loge) empty for the phantom so that they did not annoy him. The interior was incredibly ornate with oodles of gold leaf and red velvet but the central ceiling that was replaced in the 1960s(?)seemed at a odds with everything else. The painting on the new ceiling was done by Marc Chagall.

We took the Metro to the Pont Neuf, which is actually around 1000 years old, walked to Notre Dame, admired the sun setting behind the Tour Eiffel and had dinner on the rive guache (left bank)before returning to Val de Fontenay for a relatively early evening.

Tomorrow: a coach tour of Paris, a visit to Versaille, a ride in a bateau mouche on the River Seine . . .