Chad and I ended Leg 15 with four nights in Paris, which were really a perfect cap to the trip. We fell in love with Paris all over again. Our prior Paris trips have all occurred in August when it is very hot but also quite magical. In mid-November, Paris was cold and rainy, but still totally magical. Here’s how we spent our 4 days.

Day 1 – Arrival and Wrap Up Work

We took a fast train from Marseille to Paris that should have taken just under four hours but was slightly delayed in route so we arrived a little after 1 p.m. We enjoyed a tasty soup-and-sandwich lunch at a health food chain restaurant called Exki near Gare de Lyon, our arrival train station. I had mapped out a route to our hotel near Gare de l’Est via train but we checked the price of an Uber and since it was only 15 euros decided to save our energy. Even mild travel days tend to be hard so we try to cut ourselves breaks whenever we can. 

I booked our room at Hotel De Bordeaux with my Chase credit card points so we just had to pay the small lodging tax when we arrived. The man working the desk was very friendly and definitely a character. Although we were slightly early, our room was ready. We decided to rest for a while and then both had some work to wrap up. The room was the largest we’ve had in Paris (this was our fourth trip) and had a kettle and mini-fridge, which would allow us to save money by eating breakfasts in the room.

Unfortunately, the hotel’s wifi was terrible and part of Chad’s work required uploading a large file. While he rested, I researched co-working spaces and found one nearby called Hubsy. It had a perfect-for-us hourly pricing model and was about a 15-minute walk from our hotel. Despite the wifi issue, we’d definitely choose this hotel again. The location was great and it was nice having a larger room than is typical for Paris.

After our rest, we took a walk, picked up some groceries for the room, and ended at Hubsy, then I headed back to our hotel to hop on my first of two Zoom meetings. The wifi was just enough to not cause too many real problems with my Zooms but it was definitely stressful, especially because my second Zoom was during the middle of the night and was a board training where I was the presenter. Chad’s upload was done in an hour at Hubsy as planned and after my first meeting we went out for a nice dinner at a tiny nearby ramen restaurant called Ghido, which was perfect for a cold night. We didn’t manage to get any photos but it was very reminiscent of small Tokyo ramen bars we’ve been to.

Day 2 – Musée des Arts et Métiers and French Food

After our in-room breakfast, we walked from our hotel to our priority museum for this visit, the Musée des Arts et Métiers (Museum of Arts and Crafts). Though you wouldn’t know it from the name, it’s actually a history of science museum, with Foucoult’s pendulum as its centerpiece artifact. We bought our tickets and stored our coats and backpacks in a locker and began making our way through the museum. It is set up so you start at the top of one building and end with Foucoult’s Pendulum, which is in the adjacent converted church building. If we had the stamina we could have spent all day looking at the exhibits. Some highlights for us were a model of Antoine Lavoisier’s laboratory (he’s the father of modern chemistry), an early official meter stick and gram measures (the metric system was developed in France), looms through the ages, an exhibit on construction, and lots of early transportation artifacts. 

We started our museum visit shortly after they opened at 10 a.m. and happened to time our arrival in the converted church with the start of their daily demonstrations of Foucoult’s pendulum at noon. We joined the people gathered already around the pendulum and waited a few minutes for the museum staff person to arrive. He set up a series of metal pieces that looked a bit like bullets and set the pendulum in motion with an arc to the side of them. The pendulum proves that the earth is rotating because the position of the swinging pendulum stays on the same axis but the movement of the earth under it changes. You can see this most easily when the metal pieces rotate into the path of the pendulum and are knocked down. Chad and I already believed in the earth’s rotation, but it was fun to see it play out!

After the pendulum demonstration we took a closer look at some of the early cars and planes on display, and a model of the Statue of Liberty (the French seem very proud of that gift). Then we went to lunch in the neighborhood at a creperie called Divin’Art. It was fantastic. My crepe had roasted vegetables and Chad’s had feta, olives, and homemade pesto (though we shared both, as always). We enjoyed our crepes with a crisp white wine. Our friendly waiter even offered to take our photo. It was a perfect cap to the museum.

We rested in the afternoon and then went out to our dinner reservation that we’d booked that morning. We’d been looking for any brasserie with good reviews, classic French dishes, and an available reservation for two for dinner. Bofinger had a table for two available only at their earliest dinner time, 6:30, but that suited us (we don’t share European’s affinity for dining at 9 p.m.), so we grabbed it. The restaurant was really beautiful and we were lucky to sit near the gorgeous ceiling and floral display. Our meal was great, from our first course of endive salad and onion soup to our main dishes – seafood sauerkraut for Chad and sea bream and potato casserole for me. Both were specialties of Alsatian cooking, which is common to traditional brasseries. Unfortunately, we didn’t have room for dessert.

We got curious about the name of the restaurant and during that research learned it is a must-visit place on many of the lists of top brasseries in town. It also has a storied 150-year history with visits by many celebrities. We honestly just sort of lucked into it but now will recommend it to friends visiting Paris. We also found it interesting that brasserie cuisine comes from the Alsace region, opened by people who left Alsace when it changed hands from French to German. 

After dinner, we went to a small jazz bar called Le 1905 that Chad had researched, because he really wanted to see some live jazz while in Paris. It was absolutely perfect with narrow stairs up and a speakeasy vibe. Our cocktails were excellent (they even made something that was no longer on the menu for Chad) and the music was great. It was crowded but we were able to get seats on a small, low loveseat and had a great time. We took the metro back to our neighborhood from the Place de Bastille station, where I snapped a quick photo of the column all lit up.

Day 3 – Day Trip to Chartres

We’d discussed visiting the Chartres Cathedral during our past trips to Paris but never managed to fit it in. I’m glad we made time for it on this visit because it was a lovely trip. Our usual M.O. is to leave early for day trips and be the first to arrive at various attractions. But Chartres has developed a clever attraction to keep people in town after dark, a city-wide illumination of various historic buildings throughout the year from April through January. So we timed our departure from Paris for a bit later in the day, taking a 1 p.m. train from Gare Montparnasse. 

The train ride is only about an hour and we had a little snack on the ride in lieu of lunch. We walked a bit around the charming town of Chartres and picked up a map of the illuminations from the tourist office, then went to the cathedral. I’d read that the audio-tour they rent from gift shop was worth the 10 euro price so we picked up one of those. It was actually really good and provided a lot of history and context for enjoying the cathedral beyond the beautiful stained glass, and brought several images from the stained glass to life as well. The beautiful shade of blue that is so dominant in the windows is known as Chartres blue for the cathedral and it really was stunning. We spent about an hour in the cathedral admiring the art and architecture and learning from the guide. 

After the cathedral, we went to a nearby cafe restaurant that advertised nonstop service (most restaurants in France, like most of Europe, close their kitchens between 2 and 7 p.m.) and enjoyed a light meal – more onion soup for Chad and a tasty mushroom omelet for me. We got a table with a view of the cathedral and had a lovely time. 

By the time we finished, it was nearly 5 p.m. but still over an hour until it would be dark enough for the illuminations. After a bit of wandering, we found an interesting little pub and tried a few Belgian beers, which the pair of Belgians at the table next to us appreciated. The pub had rugby on the televisions but we couldn’t remember many of the rules. 

The beers provided good fortification in the cold as we went out to view the lights. The displays were all really impressive and we enjoyed this part of our Chartres visit a lot. We spent about an hour visiting several sites, including three sides of the cathedral with different illuminations. Honestly it was very impressive and worth seeing, even in the cold.

We took a 7:30 train back to Paris and the metro back to our neighborhood where we picked up a tasty doner kebab to enjoy in our room. We had brought a bottle of real champagne with us from Marseille that we’d hoped to have on election day. It complimented the kebab very well. 

Day 4 – More Museums

For our final day in Paris, we took in two more museums because we couldn’t decide between them. In the morning we visited the Musée Carnavalet, a free museum about the history of Paris. Despite spending two full hours in the museum, we saw maybe a third of its exhibits in depth, so we’ll definitely want to come back again. It is one of the best free museums we’ve ever visited.

We followed the museum with a fantastic French vegan lunch at a restaurant nearby called La Portage de Marais. We started with a mushroom pate and then I had a seitan bourguignon (imitating beef bourguignon very well with the texture of the seitan) and Chad chose a cassoulet with lentils, I believe. 

After a rest, we went out for our second museum visit at the Centre Pompidou, finally catching France’s modern art museum. We don’t normally choose evening museum visits, but the museum had a special exhibition on surrealism with timed tickets that we wanted to check out and the only time during our stay they had tickets available was 7 p.m. on our last night. The permanent collection and surrealism exhibition were both very good and a great cap to our visit. We ended our last day with dinner in a little corner restaurant near our hotel. On a Sunday night we didn’t have a lot of choices. Though the food was pretty average for French food, we had a good experience and it was a nice end to our time in Paris.

Summary

The next morning we packed up and took an Uber to Charles de Gaulle airport (though we could have taken the train from Gare du Nord not too far from our hotel) for our flight back to the United States. And the flight, I’m pleased to record, was paid for with airline points, which worked out great.

Our four days in Paris were much more like a vacation than our normal travel routine, but a truly nice way to end our time in Europe and our time on the road for 2024. We spent a good part of the trip dreaming about a longer stay in Paris sometime in the next few years. It is a city we truly love.