I’ve just written about our day in Disneyland Paris, which was part of a 4 day/3 night trip to France.
One of those days, we ventured into Paris. I found a really good walking tour online but it’s a bout 12 km which was too much for little legs after 12 hours walking around Disneyland the day before. So I just took the part about the Eiffel Tower, as that’s what we decided we wanted to see the most.
We asked at our hotel how we should get into Paris, and it matched what I’d researched beforehand which was to get the hotel Shuttle to Disneyland’s station, the Marne-la-Vallée/Chessy, and from there get the RER A (red train line) to Charles de Gaulle - Etoile station. The trip takes about 50 minutes and we bought a ticket from a machine at the Marne-la-Vallée/Chessy station. We weren’t actually sure if we’d bought a single or a return, so we checked with a person in a kiosk in Paris and it was a single, so we bought a return from her. I believe children under 4 don’t need a ticket, and those under 10 have a reduced fare. That’s under 10 though - I’ve read about people with 10 year olds buying them a child ticket and then being told they’d bought the wrong ticket. I think - from memory - we paid around €15 - €20 for all of us to go each way.
Now it ends up, Charles de Gaulle - Etoile station is pretty massive with several exits so either make a careful note of where you surface (as you’ll arrive underground) or have a satnav / Google Maps on your phone (I paid £2 a day for data roaming with Vodafone) so you can find whatever entrance suits you on the way back.
Arc de triomphe
We headed for exits for Arc de triomphe and came up just opposite it. We didn’t bother to cross the big busy road to get closer, we had a good photo spot and a good idea of scale. We also had a push chair so we didn't want to climb to the top of it. So then we headed off on a 30 walk to the Eiffel Tower.
The one other thing we wanted to do in Paris was have a proper French baguette and some sort of cake or pastry. So we stopped off at Sophie Lebreuilly Boulangerie on Avenue Marceau who had a wonderful choice and tables to sit at outside (if you don’t mind pigeons). We hadn’t had a very early start so lunch time was pretty soon into our Paris adventure!
The Eiffel Tower
From there we carried on with our trek to the Eiffel Tower - and it did feel like a bit of a trek with a very tired 6 year old and a grouchy 2 year old (who at least had a push chair to nap in). But we made it to the Eiffel tower and marvelled at how massive it is.
Last time I went to Paris - probably 15 years ago - I remember wandering right up to the legs of the tower (or pretty much). But since 2018 they’ve had glass partitions around the bottom of the tower so that you need to queue and go through security to get to the tower. It’s still free, but the queues looked long so we didn’t bother - we could see the tower fine from where we were and no one felt the need to go closer. There were some very beautiful trees on our side of the glass partitions though.
Jardins du Trocadéro
After a rest and a snack on a bench, we crossed back over the Seine (which we had crossed on our way to the tower) and up through the Jardins du Trocadéro - a large area of beautiful gardens. The centre of Paris is really very, very green! We were on a mission to just get back to the station already but you could have wandered or hung out here longer. These gardens are home to the L'Aquarium de Paris, Musée national de la Marine - a French maritime museum, and Musée de l'Homme. There’s also the cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine -the museum of architect and heritage, which I would have liked to explore with more time / less exhausted children. The gardens go up a hill which has Place du Trocadéro at the top - basically a summit where you can stand to do the classic style photos of holding the EIffel tower in your hand.
We did the Eiffel Tower photos but skipped the museums and headed back to the station. Important parenting note about Paris - there are a severe shortage of toilets! We bought our return tickets, went through a turn style and headed deep down underground, and once on the platform everyone decided we should find a loo before embarking on an hour long train ride on trains which don’t have toilets. (We Googled it from the platform and pretty sure we asked someone too.)
So we headed back up to the surface, looking for toilets as we went - we even did a “buzz for support” phone line thing but they couldn’t understand us, or we couldn’t understand them, and then they hung up! We got back up the ticket desk and asked an information person who apologised that the one toilet nearby was closed and so we’d need to go back up to the street and find a restaurant. So we did that, and headed towards a fast food sign we could see - and then walked past a public toilet! So we waited there, whilst lots of other people joined the queue behind us. We also learned from watching the queue that after someone exits, the door eventually closes and then the convenience cleans itself, before the door opens again. The whole process takes a little over a minute - but wait for the process to finish! If we hadn’t been in a queue and had just nipped straight in as the person before us left, we might have gotten drenched in a cleaning cycle!
Anywho, we made our way back down to the train platform, and waited for quite a while as the trains, which are usually every 10 minutes, hit delays. We then managed to squeeze onto a very busy train, just about hanging on to 3 kids, and travelled back to the Disney station.
Overall our eldest is very glad he saw Paris - a “real” part of France rather than just Disney - but it was a very tiring day, in hot sun, for a 6 year old who’d walked for 12 hours straight the day before.
