European Vacation {Day 3} – Paris: Notre Dame, Saint Chappell & Catacombs

I woke up super early today, like 5:30am-ish and couldn’t go back to sleep.  Sleeping three to a bed probably didn't help.

We hit up McDonalds on our way to Notre Dame this morning where I ate my first of four croissants of the day.

When we arrived at Notre Dame we found out that in order to climb to the top you had to have tickets. The earliest tickets we were able to get was around 1pm so we had some time to kill in the area.  We waited in line to enter the inside of Notre Dame.

Then we walked over to Saint Chapelle to check out the beautiful stainglass windows.   It was stunning with the sunshine streaming through.

It was hot in Paris.  Our hotel gave us two bottles of water a day, but we drank that pretty quickly and finding free water was a rarity.  We were pretty much dehydrated and didn’t eat a whole lot either.  We went in search of a highly rated smoothie place, but didn’t have any luck.  We spent a lot of time walking around it seemed.

Thankfully, we passed by Amorino and decided to treat ourselves to some yummy gelato.

We climbed 387 stairs to the tippy top of Norte Dame to view Paris from the gargoyles perspective.

We also got to go into the bell tower.  Good thing we’d watch The Hunchback of Norte Dame recently so it was fresh in our minds {wink}.

Next up was visiting Luxembourg Gardens which was a nice relaxing break from the busy city. I could have sat by this little pond for hours.

Instead we ended up waiting three hours to get into the Catacombs. We knew when we arrived it would take a least two hours to get through the line.  Abigail was ready to bag the idea, I was indifferent, and Carly was the one who decided we should stick it out.  I’m glad we did.  We didn’t have anything else planned for the day and it is definitely not something you see everyday.

Carly takes awesome notes on each of our vacations.  I’ve come to rely on her travel journals to help me remember what we’ve done on our trips.

After nearly three hours in line we finally descended into the catacombs.  There are around 6 million skeletons in the Paris catacombs.

We stumbled upon a bakery on the way back to the hotel and shared a warm baguette. It was so good I sent the girls back in for another.

We topped off the night watching the Eiffel Tower sparkle. Perfect day in Paris!