When we woke up in Paris this morning we found that - for a change - it wasn't actually raining! We still had a few hours to explore before catching the Eurostar back to London in the afternoon, so we checked out of the apartment and made our way back into the city centre. After breakfast at a cafe near the Arc de Triomphe, we began walking down the Champs-Élysées.
We had originally been planning to do this walk yesterday afternoon, but changed our minds when it was raining so much. Sunday morning actually turned out to be a good time for it; most of the shops were closed and so everywhere was much less busy than it had been yesterday.
We passed the Grand Palais...
...and arrived in the Place de la Concorde, the city's main square.
In the middle of the square is the Luxor Obelisk, transported to France from Egypt in the 1830s.
The buildings surrounding the squares are very grand.
From here we didn't have far to walk to get to the Tuileries Garden.
This was fairly quiet on a Sunday morning too; just a few people out jogging.
We even found a duck!
As we walked further through the gardens we were able to turn around and get a view back towards the Eiffel Tower.
And if you look carefully at this photo below, you should be able to see not just the obelisk in Place de la Concorde, but also the Arc de Triomphe behind it and the tall towers of the business district where we'd been staying behind that.
Soon we'd reached the Louvre museum, complete with its distinctive pyramid.
Round the corner from there we had a view of the river Seine and, in the distance, the towers of Notre Dame.
After that we jumped on the metro and travelled to the suburb of Montmartre, which is home to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica. I think we must have arrived at a different metro station to the one we used last time we were in Paris. First of all we had to climb 181 steps just to exit the station. Then when we finally made it to the surface, we couldn't actually see the famous church anywhere. It took quite a bit of walking uphill followed by some steep staircases before we eventually got this view.
It was incredibly busy in Montmartre - by far the busiest place we've been in Paris this weekend - so we didn't linger long. We found a restaurant that wasn't too expensive to get lunch, then began the walk (thankfully downhill this time!) towards Gare du Nord, from where we'd be catching our train back to London.
On the way we got a glimpse of the basilica from a distance: this was definitely the more scenic way we'd approached it on previous trips to Paris!
Never mind. It was an easy walk back to Gare du Nord and the journey back to London all went very smoothly, with the Eurostar running exactly to schedule. The weather may not have been perfect this weekend but we've made the best of it and managed to pack in a lot regardless
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