Paris: Part One

You’ve gotta know by now how much I love to travel. I am grateful so many people in my life love to travel as well. Just today I was telling Braun that my goal is to go somewhere every month. He thinks I’m crazy but I’m dead serious. I told him that I work so that I can travel. He works so that we can like have a house, eat, survive… ya know, the important stuff.  End of story. 

So let’s chat about Paris. Last year my business partner and BFF,  Layla and I set ourselves a lofty goal. We worked tirelessly to hit it. It seemed pretty out of reach to be completely honest. Well our hard work eventually paid off and we hit it! Side note: I think goal and reward setting is huge. It doesn’t have to a trip to Paris… it can be whatever you’re excited about. An extra date with your husband, a new book at the bookstore, a big ole’ dessert on the weekend if you’re trying to eat clean…. just something you are excited about and can look forward to if you put in hard work and achieve your goal. So back to Paris, we were sitting in a job interview last summer and I got an alert on my phone. Round trip, non-stop tickets to Paris for $450. #NoBrainer!  Right in the middle of the job interview, I pulled out my laptop and booked our flights and 3 months later, Layla and I found ourselves headed to Paris! 

I have a whole blog post HERE about my top 5 favorite travel items and another huge one HERE with ALLL of my favorite travel items.  I will link a few of them here too to make it easy for ya!

Flight time to Paris is about 9 hours from SLC. We got on our matching Paris sweaters, comfy leggings, good airplane pillows and a sleeping pill and we were set! 

We stayed in Hotel Saint James and it was the dreamiest Parisian hotel, about 5 minutes away from the Eiffel tower. We used Uber to get around the whole time {which I highly recommend} It wasn’t hard to find people there who speak English which was really nice. I did download Google Translate before we left just incase we ran into an issue. Look how dang cute and Parisian our hotel was! The inside was even better! 

We took an Uber to the Eiffel Tower, took a million pictures and tried to find a gluten free crepe since there were so many cute carts around. Sadly, none of them were GF. We ended up walking about 10 minutes to the yummiest creperie. Framboise Passy Trocadero. From there we took an Uber to the Arc De Triomphe. We bought tickets on the Get Your Guide app. Goodness, that app SAVED us while we were there. You can buy all your tickets beforehand, pay a little extra to skip the line and also can purchase a literal tour guide which was amazing! 

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Another app that really helped while we were there and also when Braun and I went and toured Europe for 3 weeks last year was Sygic Travel. I love using that to help plan out your days in unfamiliar places. You can put in the amount of time you will be there traveling and it will plan your days out for you based on the most popular things people do there.  So I put that we would be in Paris for 5 days and it not only tells you the most popular/famous things to do in Paris but it maps out how far they are from each other so you know what order to do them in so you don’t waste your time. I can’t recommend it enough! 

Going to the top of the Arc De Triomphe was breathtaking. It was exactly how I pictured it to be. You see the beautiful Eiffel Tower in the distance and see how perfect Paris is laid out. I HIGHLY recommend going up there. My legs about fell off walking up all the stairs but Layla did it in heels, so its doable.

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From there, we walked down Champs Elysse. SO MANY AMAZING stores! We got macarons and just took our time strolling around. I watched the creepiest dude shoplifting in Sephora and also watched him get caught which was cool too. haha!

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We took a boat tour down the Sienne River at nighttime and seeing the sparkly Eiffel Tower light up while on the boat, well that was pretty magical too. 

We had been told by a lot of people to go to Le “Relais de L’Entrecote” for dinner. It is purely steak and fries. I think that is actually all that they serve. The fries are bottomless and the steak was decent. Was it worth it? Eh. That’s debatable. But it is a famous hot spot and was jam packed. 

Day 2!

I’ll have you know we were basically running from museum to museum this entire trip. We only had 3.5 FULL days so we packed them so full. We woke up early, had room service (with the most delicious gluten free bread with jam, croissants, chocolate croissants!) fruit plates and yogurt. I always left so full. We went to the Louvre. It was so neat seeing all the history that that building holds. We could’ve easily been in there all day. We booked a tour guide and got our tickets before on the Get Your Guide app. 

The Mona Lisa was about 100 times smaller than I thought she would be. The room she was in was SO jam packed too so it was hard to get up close to her. I loved having a guide in there with us to show us the most popular things we needed to see. It was also neat hearing behind the scenes things about the museum from her too. Like how the Mona Lisa was stolen?? I loved it. 

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Outside the Louvre are a lot of people riding bikes ready to take you anywhere. We had tickets for the Notre Dame tour (again, from Get Your Guide) so we had to ride so fast over there. We actually missed our tour group so we were friendly with one of the greeters so they let us sneak inside. We didn’t get the tour which we were bummed about but the Notre Dame is BEAUTIFUL inside so just seeing that was good enough for me. 

Outside the Notre Dame there are no less than 14 million pigeons. Bring a couple dollars and buy food from one of the people selling it out front. The pictures are totally worth it!

From there we walked over to Saint Chapel. OH MY GOODNESS. The most breathtaking stained glass windows you will ever see. It was unreal. Layla and I walked into the main floor and were wondering what the fuss was about initially. Then we realized there is a teeny staircase that takes you up the stairs and WOW. It was incredible. 

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From there, we took an Uber to Culture Crepes. Gimme those delicious morsels of heaven!   [flex_row] [/flex_row]

Next on our agenda was the Musee d’Orsay art museum. I don’t feel like I appreciate art as much as I should. I’ll just put it that way. It was beautiful and I was glad that I went but it wasn’t my favorite. 

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Stay Tuned for Part 2.. I am going to tell you ALLLL about how I got scammed out a lot of money in the blink of an eye. how I chased down the dudes (what was I thinking!?!) and somehow got it back… Yikes! I hope you all learn from my stupidity and don’t let yourself fall for it too…