Rain, rain, go away!

Saturday 14^th September.

Drizzling rain again today. Yawn ….. We figure we’ll try our hand at catching a bus and if we get it right, we’ll end up at the Tour Montparnasse, 59 stories tall, celebrating its’ 40^th anniversary and it has a lift! If we can see the top when we get there, we’ll pay up and ride to the top, well, the 56^th floor at least. To get to the 59^th, it’s stairs!! Turns out, the buses are quite easy and there’s no stair climbing involved as with the Metro. Then the plan is to walk to the Catacombs, not that far away. It was a toss up between going up the Eiffel Tower or the Montparnasse Tower.

We catch the bus across the road from our flat and easily get to our destination. It’s a bit hard to hide a 59 storey building in this part of Paris. Yes, we can see the top, so we head up. Not too much waiting which is good. The view is pretty good and on a clear day it would be amazing. We can see the Eiffel Tower, which wouldn’t be part of the landscape had we gone up it. We spent as much time there as we wanted, then started walking to the Catacombs, all the while in the misty rain. We took a wrong turn and found a Japanese restaurant so had some lunch, the walked down a pedestrian street, Rue Danguerre I think, with so many food stalls, we were tempted to buy a punnet of fresh raspberries for 2 euros to eat as we walked. Yummy.

Rain, coming and going. Getting pretty fed up with it.

When we got to the Catacombs we were sorely disappointed by the length of the line, but found the end and went to join but a security man told us that he was the end of the line and we couldn’t join because we wouldn’t get in before they took their last customers. Bummer!

So off to find the bus to take us back into town. One bus will take us ‘home’ or from another stop we can go towards the Musee d’Orsay, so, wanting to go there, we get on that bus. The line there is nasty and it’s still raining, so, can’t be bothered standing waiting in the rain, we walk along the Seine toward Notre Dame. We zig-zag across the bridges and crossing the Pont des Arts (the ‘proper’ one with all the locks on it, not the bridge we crossed the other day) I pick up a sample vial of Giorgio Armani’s new fragrance. Half of Parisien women will be smelling of this one tomorrow.  It’s the Notre Dame’s  850^th anniversary and there’s commemorative ‘medallion’ for 2 euros, which would be a nice souvenir. The line there is worse than it was yesterday, so we give up on that plan too. We can go back later. We find out later that this weekend is a special European Heritage weekend, so every man and his dog are out and about, moreso than a normal weekend. I’m really over walking around in the wet, it’s not romantic, it’s just a pain, especially when you’re juggling an umbrella and a camera.

Our street runs right down to the river, so we continue walking along the river till we get to it and turn for home. Dinner is found after a walk down Rue Mouffetard, and a crepe with Nutella eaten on the way home is dessert.