I had hoped to post regularly and have Shelby writing about our adventures but our wifi has not been the best at the house we are in so the kids are not connected and I am limiting all of our time as to not eat up the precious time on the wifi box that is available to us.

But I’d like to get something off as I promised I would use Shelby’s website to keep in touch. I’ll start with our arrival in to Paris.

We landed at 8:30am after a 9 hour flight which was more through our evening as opposed to night. We should have been heading to bed since at home it was 11:30pm. Well no time like the present to start to adjust our sleep schedule. Since our hotel room wasn’t available till 3pm we dropped off our bags and dragged the kids to the Eiffel Tower!

Might as well pull out the big guns straight away. We decided not to climb it, Max for one was not interested, he thought it was too high and the line ups were crazy long. Having a very practical husband he recommended after speaking to fellow pilot that had just been to Paris with his wife a couple weeks before  that we go to the top of the Arc de Triomphe at Champs Elysees and there we would have beautiful views of Paris and the Eiffel Tower.

So after sitting around the grounds of the Eiffel tower and strolling the Seine we start heading back to the metro to get to our hotel for a break and shower before dinner. Just starts that pocket pat down and then says that he can’t find his iPhone. I check my purse, we check his jacket again, my purse again and his jacket again trying to will it to materialize. Unfortunately no such luck. During our sit down on the grass by the tower, Max and Justin went to the park about 75 feet away and Shelby and I stayed sitting there. Well while we were relaxing I became aware of a rather foul odour. I stood up and looked in the bush behind us and there was a young man pulling his pants up after doing a number 2, yes, in the bush, beside the Eiffel Tower. I couldn’t stand the smell so I told Shelby to get up, I grabbed Justin’s jacket that I was sitting on and we went to the park to meet the boys. It wasn’t till the walk back to the metro that we realized what happened. After a quick run back I found out from a couple still sitting nearby that she recalled someone picking something up from where we were right after we left. 🙁 ugh – what a way to start off our day in the city of love! On the bright side it was day 1 and we could have lost man more photos and memories from our trip had it been later.

After the metro we are walking back to our hotel and Justin is carrying Max since he fell asleep on the subway.

Asleep on the metro

As we pass under some trees Justin abruptly puts Max down, as I look over at him I notice he has a green blob on his neck, yup, a bird just pooped on him! missed his clothes completely and hit him on the side of the neck, he scoops it away and is thinking “what the heck – who threw warm guacamole on me!” as he’s looks up at the windows in the area. I’m rifling in my purse for a kleenex or something and a man from the restaurant right beside us comes out and hands him a wet paper towel…he just shrugs his shoulders and gives us that “*!#@ happens” expression. We are able to laugh for the first time since we realized we lost the phone.

We ended our “poopy” day with dinner in a lovely neighbourhood on a street closed to traffic called Rue Daguerre, named for the man who invented photography. Rue Daguerre is home to a few restaurants but mainly businesses selling food sort of like a spontaneous supermarket but without a common roof. A Parisian would say to is a remnant of ancient logic – put all the food shops of a quartier (neighbourhood) on one street for convenience  – and the logic still holds. It is a beautiful site of sensible commerce.

Shelby on Rue Daguerre

Aurevoir, till next time.