Robert's Travels

The last day of our trip began in the air. Our trip home had a layover in Paris; and because we had taken off from Johannesburg in the evening our flight to Paris was about half over when the clock struck midnight. We watched a bit of TV prior to being served dinner on the flight, then both Todd and I spent most of the remainder of the flight trying to sleep.

Our flight landed on time at Charles de Gaulle airport - a bright and early 5:40. Our flight to Toronto was not scheduled to depart until 13:50 that afternoon, so we decided to see some sights in Paris instead of spending 8 hours waiting in the airport! We took a shuttle tram from our arrival gate to the main Terminal 2E building, cleared EU immigration, and then walked to the TGV station in Terminal 2. We left the glass vase we had purchased in Swaziland at a baggage storage service in the station, as we did not want to have to carry it as we walked around. Our suitcases had been checked through to Toronto, so we thankfully didn’t need to worry about them. Once the vase was safely stored we purchased a city transit pass, and then got onto the RER B train heading into Paris. We were on schedule at this point; the train departed at 7:05. It is worth noting that leaving Terminal 2 required a fair bit of walking time; immigration also took about 30 minutes. We took the RER B line to the St Michel/Notre Dame station, and then transferred to the RER C line. It was another 3 stops before we walked out at the Eiffel Tower station. We had a 5 minute walk from the station to the tower, and we caught some glimpses of the building as we were walking. At 8:20 we were near the base of the tower. We popped into a cafe to get some water and some croissants, and had a quick breakfast on a park bench looking up at the Eiffel Tower. After breakfast we walked over to the park and got a much clearer view of the tower. The sun was out and it was a beautiful clear day, and it was fun to walk around a bit.

The tower didn’t open until 9:00, and we didn’t have time to go up, so instead we walked back to the Eiffel Tower station shortly before 9:00 and took the RER C back to the Notre Dame station. Here we got out and walked over to the Notre Dame basilica. We spent a few moments admiring the structure from the plaza out front, then walked into the building and did a loop through the inside of the basilica. The typical crowds of people had not yet showed up, which was nice as we didn’t feel crowded or rushed. We spent probably 20-30 minutes in the building, and shortly before 10:00 we walked back to the Notre Dame station and got back onto the RER B headed towards CDG. We were lucky and got onto an express train; we were back in the airport at 10:45. We reclaimed the glass vase we had left with the baggage storage service, the walked back to Terminal 2E. It was a bit confusing to find the security line, as the baggage check area for Air France was super full, but we got through immigration and security without an issue and got to our gate about 2 hours before departure.

We relaxed a bit, had a light lunch in the terminal, then got into line to board the plane. The boarding process took a surprisingly long time, but luckily we had no issues finding space for the glass vase in the overhead bins when we reached our seats. We were on an older Boeing 777, however the seats were comfortable. There was an almost 30 minute delay in pushing back from the gate, which led to us taking off about 50 minutes later than scheduled. The flight was fine.