To the Eiffel Tower

On Thursday, August 18, 2016, since we had a 7:30 p.m. flight, and since Icelandair doesn’t provide free meals for economy-class passengers, we had dinner at the airport. We were a little worried that we might not find anything good at Terminal 2 (Humphrey), but it turns out that our favorite wine and cheese store, Surdyk’s, has a wine bar and sandwich place in that terminal, so we ate pretty well. After changing planes in Reykjavik, we arrived at 1:00 p.m. the next day at Paris Orly, an airport we had never been to before. Having been forewarned that European airport ATMs are being taken over by exchange bureaus, rather than banks, so that you would get exchange bureau exchange rates rather than the much better bank rates, we went past a Travelex ATM to the Banque Postale one. I had gotten tickets online for the shuttle bus into Paris, and we got off at the first stop, Gare Montparnasse. I had found a hotel—Hotel Legend—nearby, since we would be taking the same bus back to Orly the next day. The hotel staff was very pleasant and helpful and the room itself was very nice, though small (but not as small as our room in London would be!).
We walked to the Eiffel Tower. I had gotten tickets online, with a time of 5:30. There was not much of a wait, except for the elevator from the mid-level to the top, and even that was bearable. This was the first time that Mary Joy had been up there. I’d gone up back in October 1991, when I’d been in Paris with my dad. He hadn’t gone up. When Mary Joy and I came down, the sun was low in the sky, and we headed for a restaurant we had liked when we had spent a night in that neighborhood in 2009—Café Constant. We had a nice dinner, then walked back to our hotel.