Our Hotel Room

I chose the hotel from the various hotel websites; our favorite is closed for renovation.  (We walked over there...they weren't kidding.)  As is everything else in life, the reality isn't quite the paradise of the website photos.

On the plus side, the location couldn't be better, a few steps from Bastille.  It's clean, recently refurbished. We're on the 1st floor European (2nd floor U.S.), no elevator. It's quiet because I requested a room in the back.  Our view is windows across an ugly courtyard.  We could've had a view of the July 1830 column at the center of Place de la Bastille, but that meant climbing more stairs & fronting on a noisy street.

Our one challenge is that the room is small; smaller than we expected.  Normally we put some of our things into drawers (Drawers?  What drawers here?) & the closet, then work out of our suitcases from the floor or suitcase stand.  (What floor space??)

Fortunately, Susanne is an expert at utilizing space.

We divided everything we brought into three categories:

1. What we don't need til the trip back home, returned to one piece of stored luggage.

2. What we need occasionally during the trip, stored in one part of the working suitcase.

3. What we need access to daily, stuffed into the limited shelf space & in the working suitcase.

So, what seemed like a real pain yesterday all jet lagged out, just needed some organization this morning after a good night's sleep.

Today we'll get our cell phones SIM'd up & dash over to the Trocadero so we know we're REALLY in Paris.

Then our visit (and this blog) truly starts.

My opinion...you can't genuinely do Paris in anything less than five days.  If you're only doing Paris, then add a day's travel on each end & it's a week absolute minimum.  More on that later.