A real trip from London to Paris by Eurostar, staying 2 nights -------------------------------------------------------------- This document is primarily a guide for people with GPS receivers who want to do a GPS-guided tour of Paris and see what is actually achievable. Ideally this should be updated as more efficient ways are found to do similar things, enabling more things to be done. There were two people on this trip, my wife and myself. Most of the GPS readings were obtained by choosing the "average" function on my Garmin 12, but only for the length of time required to enter the waypoint name. This document is released to the public domain. On Saturday 6th February, 1999 we caught a train at about 5:33am from Hounslow train station (HNSLTR), arriving at London Waterloo station (LWTLOO) at 6:08. The train ticket cost 3.80 each, and we had bought the tickets a couple of days before departing so that we didn't have any hassles from ticket machines. The Eurostar tickets had been purchased several weeks earlier on a special deal advertised on TV (not that we've got a TV understand, as you need a licence for that), 2 tickets for 99 pounds, but you have to come back on a Monday if you don't want to pay an extra 10 pounds for travelling on Sunday. We departed on the Eurostar at about 07:10. We reached the UK side of the Channel Tunnel at about 08:40 (UKTNNL - miles innaccurate due to track problems), the French side of the tunnel (FRTNNL - quite innaccurate) at about 09:00 UTC which became 10:00 French time, which will be used from now on. The Eurostar then went to the Garue Norde station in Paris (ESTRFR) arriving at 11:26. From there we queued up at the cash machine for ages, then went down the escalators to the metro, passing heaps of vacant cash machines on the way! We bought day pass tickets for 55F each, zones 1-3. This was a mistake. We would have been better off buying a carnet (10 singles for 52F). The singles allow you to travel between any 2 places in Paris it seems. They call it zones 1 and 2, but I don't know where the borders are. Incidentally the toilets at the station cost 2.80F so it's presumably better to go on the Eurostar, or presumably London Waterloo after you've got into the Eurostar waiting place (20p in the main station). We arrived in Bastilles (BASTLL) at 12:14, then went to our hotel, Hotel Castex (CASTEX) in Rue de Castex. The room was nice and clean, and a lot cheaper (340F per night for a double) than the alternatives. The room was small (not a problem). Our room was near the central stairs so there was a bit of noise from the other tenants. My wife thought the second night there was cold, but basically, it's where we'd go again. That was with shower and toilet. No TV, a communal one downstairs though, where I could find out what the French watched, which isn't wall to wall porn as I was hoping er expecting er was very glad indeed to see. Hundreds of satellite channels, the English language shows had been voiced over, although there was still some that were still in English, plus CNN etc in English. We then walked to Notre Dame (NOTDAM), using a waypoint I downloaded from the internet which said I wasn't far from it. I was, the waypoint was 530 metres out, and the proprieter of the church 530 metres from Notre Dame seemed quite surprised when I told him I'd come to ring his bell! So we didn't arrive until 13:19. Then we walked to the Latin Quarter, looking for something to eat, preferably near somewhere to vomit in case they told us the finer points of some of the ingredients. There was a large church there, St Severin (SEVRIN). We couldn't really decide what and where to eat, we sort of wanted a traditional French snack, but couldn't find anything suitable. We continued searching, and then suddenly there was a hailstorm, so we just went to the first restaurant we could see, which turned out to be Vietnamese! It was 30F each, the woman didn't speak English, and we had a lot of trouble ordering (I was about to do an impression of a cow ala "Dances with Wolves") when she "remembered" she had an English translation. Then we attempted to go to Invalides (since we had a GPS location from the internet) by catching a random bus going in the general direction. This bus actually took us past Place de la Concorde, and another big building, so we thought it was a good idea to get off to find out what we'd struck. We went forward rather than back, and thus got to La Madeleine (MADLIN) at 15:40. We then walked around the recommended route in our book, taking us to Opera de Paris Garnier. For some reason I don't have a GPS location for that though, not sure what happened there, as I'm sure I took one. I then tried to convince my wife to go down into the sewers, so that she could find that back entrance that the Phantom had. I obviously couldn't go myself because of my bad back and arthritis and all, but she refused to go, citing all sorts of whacky excuses like not liking rats. That's rich coming from someone who doesn't see wildlife, just potential meals. We might have been able to get in a different way, but the only sign of life we saw was some curtain flickering high up. We then took the random bus heading towards Invalides again, but that didn't take us far before it veered off in the wrong direction, so we got out and went back to where my GPS receiver said to go. That turned out to be pretty close to the Louvre, so I took a temporary reading. We happened to be at a bus stop which had a number 69 that my wife recognized as going to Invalides, so we were home and hosed. We arrived at Invalides (INVALD) at 16:48. We went through the building and took a reading on the South side, at the main entrance, ie the gold dome side. Napolean's tomb is nearby, but we didn't go in. It started raining, and we hopped on the first bus, GPS in hand, staying on until it veered off our route to the Arc de Triumph (TRIUMP), then caught another bus going up the street. My wife first spotted the building, and thought it was that, and my GPS seemed to confirm that, so we got on the next bus going that way (still about 700 metres off). As we got off, my wife then decided that wasn't it, but I assured her that it was not a good idea to be arguing against the GPS receiver at this point in time. I was looking forward seeing whether or not it was possible to dash across 8 lanes of traffic, but my wife refused to try it whilst I took the photo, so instead we went via the underground passageway. There was a museum of some sort you could go to, but light was fast running out and we weren't interested anyway, so went up the other route to the Arc proper. I took my GPS reading from the centre, averaging it out like I did for most readings. We then walked down the Champ de Elysees and by the time we got to the Franklin Roosevelt square (ROSVLT), we were sick of walking and started catching random buses again. The first one took us North rather than East and we got off at some large train station (confirmed by GPS that it wasn't the Eurostar one), and we went down some spooky street till we hit some busy road and once again we were off. Whilst in that bus my wife discovered another bus stop with a recognizable number (29?) and we hopped off at the next stop, went back, and were on our way again. I spent the whole time on the bus trying to get a GPS track without success. The buildings are so grand, in comparison to the streets, that the satellites are not line of sight. However, I wasn't about to give up just yet. I was originally sitting behind my wife so that we both had window seats, but then I moved to the other side of the bus, next to some girls, who probably thought I was going to try to impress them with my GPS, when all I wanted them to do was move so that I could have the window seat on that side. I still couldn't find the satellites, so I moved to the back of the bus to try to get the back window view. Still unsuccessful, so went back to the girls, who probably thought I thought they stunk so had moved away from them. I then decided that my wife's seat was the ideal place to see satellites, so asked her to move to sit next to the other girls. I hadn't previously been sitting with her so it must have looked like I'd asked a total stranger to give up their seat and sit next to those stinking women over there. Soon we came to some sort of clearing, and I was just about to get a reading when my wife tapped me on the shoulder to say we were there! The clearing was presumably Bastilles, and we'd made the 4km journey intact. Incidentally, we made all these trips by bus rather than the more obvious Metro because it enabled us to both see the sights and get a GPS track. That night we went to a restaurant called Le Baracane, 38 Rue des Tournelles (FRREST) marked in our book as being a good, reasonably-priced restaurant. Their non-smoking section was full so we took our chances. The waitress helped us with our order, they didn't have English translations. I don't know what planet these people come from, but wake up, just what percentage of your customers speak English and not French? Enough to justify the cost of a once-off translation I'll warrant. 3 of the 4 dishes were good, but at the end of the day, it was miles away from being good value for money, the bill coming to 330F without dessert. They were turning away customers though, presumably they all read the same book. We were there at 20:04. My wife assured me that she would wake up at a reasonable time, no need for alarms, as we wanted to get to the Eifel tower (EIFEL) early to avoid the queues. However, she hadn't changed her watch to French time! But the real killer was the showers. They have the curtain-style showers that went out of fashion with my great great grandmother "twice deceased" (people always say that). And my wife being an upper-class snob had never actually had to use one of them before, she had only ever used modern showers, built for modern women who know where they're going! So she neglected to put the curtain inside, and proceeded instead to flood the bathroom and even the outside. A lot of wringing out of the bath mat and a lot of toilet paper later, and most evidence of the flooding was gone. But when we opened the outside door we found that some of it had gone into the hall. We now had to choose a strategy, out of a Homer Simpson "It was like that when we got here", "no speaka the English or French except for the bit required to check in" and "We'd like to complain about someone spilling water outside our door". We ended up opting for a Basil Fawlty "sorry, I just fainted, nevermind, I'll just quickly get to the doctor, bye" as we piled out the door. We had eaten some cakes (brought with us) for breakfast, so there were no more delays, but we only managed to get to the Eifel Tower at 10:46. At the Eifel Tower it cost 15F to take the stairs. I went up 2 sets, my wife went up 1. There are 4 sections to the tower, and apparently the last one is lift-only. I didn't realise there was a 3rd section, and didn't think I could repeat what I had already done in reasonable time, and my wife didn't have anything to do down on level 1 except meet suave sophisticated French men, the bane of the rest of the western world's male population, so all round I thought it was best to call it quits and move on. I was able to take my GPS reading from the dead centre of the tower on the ground. In hindsight I should also have tried out the altitude measurements. My wife was more scared on the way down than she was on the way up, despite my reassurances that less than 3 people per week plunge to their deaths and have their brains splattered all over the ground. We then went on a cruise (CRUISE) along the Seine, the boarding point was right next to the tower. The trip was fairly uneventful, I was able to use the GPS to find out some of the sites. The guide was translating in about 4 different languages. The ferry returned at 13:04. We then walked across the Parc du Champ de Mars, to some building called Ecole Militaire (ECOLE), arriving at 13:24. We then walked to Invalides to try to catch the bus we knew went to the Louvre, only to discover (after waiting for the bus and subsequently looking up the translation for some of the information on the bus stop), that the bus didn't run on Sunday. So we caught the Metro (METINV) which was nearby. So we finally got to the Louvre (LOUVRE - fix taken from directly underneath the pyramid) at 15:07. Actually we got there a bit before, and had lunch standing up at some food hall in the complex. There was nothing I could see that was French-like, so ended up having a hamburger and chicken nugget sandwich. The hamburger was only 8F! It was the equivalent of a McDonald's "Junior Burger". Because it was the first Sunday of the month, entrance was free, instead of the normal 15F for Sunday or after 3PM Monday-Saturday, or 45F for Monday-Saturday prior to 3PM, but my wife paid 30F for the audio guide. We got to see some famous things, including the Mona Lisa, but I was unable to get a GPS fix for any of them, which is a shame, because they took quite a bit of finding, as this is one huge complex! Even the lifts were confusing, or at least the people in them. We'd decided that rather than getting lost looking for stairs, getting lost going up stairs, and getting lost from not even going in the right direction, we'd join all the crabby old women who catch lifts because their arthritis doesn't allow them to do anything these days although it never seems to affect their jaw, which is the bit that always had the most movement anyway. So the lift came up, packed, and the people didn't get off, so I was smart enough to realise that this meant they were planning on going further up, so rather than cram on like some of the idiots around me tried to, I'd wait for the return journey. And guess what, it went down again! The people on there were just glorified lift-addicts, nothing better to do than stop crabby old ladies with arthritis from using the lifts. It came back again and this time they got off, and we got on along with a crabby old lady with arthritis. I complained to the crabby old lady with arthritis that those people were completely mad, they did the irrational, unscientific thing, it was not my fault. Incidentally, it turned out she wasn't a crabby old lady with arthritis, she was an American tourist. And she reckoned that they were probably trying to get to the floor above but that the lift musn't be going there. Can you believe it? Stuck in a lift with a loudmouthed American tourist giving me lectures about how to catch lifts. Worse than the crabby old ladies with non-jaw arthritis. We left at a bit after 17:00, and then a strange thing seemed to happen. According to my GPS I somehow managed to get a waypoint stored around this time, which was to confuse the hell out of me later. The waypoint was: W NREIFL N48 51.6392 E002 20.1278 Sun Dec 31 00:00:00 1989 07-FEB-99 16:35 which is 260 metres away from the pyramid, around about Northwest. It could well have been my temporary fix from the day before, and I had just been thinking of the Eifel tower when I entered it, meaning to say "near Louvre". In actual fact, I HAD made a reading, "NREIF", which is what I called "ECOLE" before I knew what it was. So that explains how I could have taken two readings, as I had a slightly different name. But the time that was marked by the GPS was about the time that I was going down to the underground metro in the Louvre, I never had an opportunity to make a reading. And the other problem with the "near Louvre" theory is that I deliberately deleted the LOUVRE entry so that I could make a fresh one under the Pyramid! So I was tempted to write it off as an odd bug in my Garmin 12 receiver, but that's hard to justify too when it got a name like "NREIFL", although I had actually taken a reading the previous day as the bus to somewhere else went past the Eifel Tower so I called that temporary location "NREIFL" or close. I deleted that when I got my real reading though. And it certainly wasn't at the stated time either. So the bug would have to be that whilst I was trying to get a fix near the Mona Lisa (I'm not sure exactly what time I left to go to the Metro), it managed to recall two deleted waypoints (the old LOUVRE and NREIFL), associate them together, and make a fresh waypoint! And to top off all the confusion, I thought I had taken a reading of Opera Garnier, but it is nowhere to be found, yet not that far from NREIFL. (Many months later I was able to establish without a doubt that my Garmin 12 sometimes got the date wrong, and this problem has been fixed in version 4.55 of the firmware which I have since flashed onto my unit). That night we decided to just get some cheap food locally, and found a good place, Trateur (TRATER), which is actually a Chinese restaurant. We actually wanted to eat French whilst in France, but we figured we would do that the next day back in the Latin Quarter where we had previously seen some uniquely French food. The restaurant is actually a "diner" or similar, and you pay upfront for your food. As well as the food being fine, it was non-smoking, or so the "Defense de fumer" sign presumably said. I saw one guy pull out his packet of cigarettes, look around for an ashtray and then put it away again. I suppose that's the trick, take the table with the ashtray, and when someone asks if they can take it from you, refuse, say that you're just about to use it (and if they ask what for, say "spit bowl"). It actually snowed whilst we were eating, so we had to rush back to the hotel without taking a GPS reading, which I did the next day. On the Monday, we had breakfast at the hotel. It was 25F each for a couple of different types of bread and orange juice and hot chocolate. This is typical of the continent, they don't seem to have the same concept of a hearty cereal plus bacon and eggs for breakfast. Where else in the world can you find a synonym for bread being "Full continental breakfast"? We then went to Metro station Rue de la Pompe to look for some shops, found nothing of interest and then walked to where Princess Diana died. This was NOT because I am a morbid kind of guy (I am a puritan in such matters and believe such tendencies should be satisfied by straight necrophilia), nor is it because I'm a fan of the royal family come to pay my respects, or a hater of the royal family come to make sure she's dead and buried. Nor am I a conspiracy theorist looking for evidence of MI5 tampering, perhaps swapping the sign that says "this bit is the road, drive here" with the one saying "this bit's the wall, try not to hit it", and erecting a sign saying "don't bother wearing a seatbelt, that's only for bodyguards who have muscles for brains so don't realise that independent thinkers make up their own minds about such matters". It was simply because I had seen that tunnel so many times on TV, I just wanted to see if it really existed! I had a mark on a map from the hotel to guide me, plus the GPS for the compass. We eventually got there, walked straight past the place since the guy had erroneously given us the other side of the bridge. We weren't even sure we were on the right bridge anyway, so got to try my luck with the average Frenchman. This was going to be the true test of all the stories you hear about the French. There were two mitigating factors, one is that I didn't go up to them and say "Excuse me, do you speak English", I instead said "Excuse Em Wa, parley voo ong glice". The other is that my wife is Chinese, so obviously not the "hated" English. The first woman said she spoke a little, but didn't know where Diana died, but when I showed her the map, was able to confirm I was on the right bridge, just cross. I crossed over, still no sign of Diana, so tried my luck again. This person didn't speak English, but I said "Princess Diana" and he knew what I was after, and pointed me back to the other side of the bridge, where he was going too, and pointed to a statue. I said "mercy bercoo" and went there. The statue (DIANEM) actually appears like it was already there, and is some French-American cooperation statue. It was plastered with Diana tributes, and even graffiti saying that you needed to go to the other side of the tunnel. Which I did, and it's just like you see on TV. I had to go into some garden in order to get my GPS reading (DIANET). There was grafitti saying "It was not an accident", presumably referring to the common pasttime the French enjoy - slamming into a wall without a seatbelt at 100mph deliberately to see if your crumple zone works or not. In any civilized country, you just stick with whacking the dashboard to see how hard you have to hit it to get the airbag to come out. We then started walking to Place de la Concorde and on the way went past the Grand Palais. I marked the University entrance (GRPLUV). I did a suicide dash across about 13 lanes of traffic (not all in use) to get to some statue in the middle of Place de la Concord (CONCRD) which I marked. I also marked the Metro (METCNC) at the Place de la Concorde. Then on to the Ritz, which is located in the Place Vendome. I marked the centre of this, a statue for Napolean (VENNAP). The Ritz was in the East, so I marked that (RITZ) too. I went all the way around to get to the back of the Ritz, found the Ritz club, and it looked like it might have been the street. I asked what looked like a courier if he spoke English, which he didn't, but he tried very hard to help me anyway, only knowing a snatch of English. He basically insisted she went out the front way, but I wasn't able to communicate the word "back" to him, which might have enabled him to remember that (assuming I remembered correctly). Regardless, I was unable to get a GPS fix. We then attempted to find the Palais Royal. We did this by walking South from the Ritz, past some church which we couldn't find on the map, so mustn't have been good looking after all, then into the Jardin des Tuileries which looked on the map to be a really big and beautiful garden, but which actually appeared to be a long dirt track. So we went along to near the Louvre and then attempted to head Northwest to get to the Palais Royal. I assume the first street we encountered, to go North, was Rue de Pyramides. Regardless, it was a bad move. We turned right at some sign that appeared to point the way, and that was presumably Avenue de L'Opera. We certainly went past a metro that had an elevator as an entrance. It looked like the sort of metro station that Batman would use, if his car ever broke down. We then got to somewhere that was presumably Place Andre Malraux. Certainly we could see the Hotel de Louvre plain as day, but we couldn't see that on the map! So I got to the centre of the circular place we were at and got a GPS reading. Then I checked the nearest waypoints and found that I was just a little bit north of "NREIFL". I figured we had walked too far the wrong way, and was getting really confused, because "NREIFL" (which I remembered as being Ecole Militaire) was just south of the Eifel Tower, and I sure couldn't see that anywhere. The next closest waypoint was the Louvre, and my GPS was saying that I hadn't managed to get very far from it either. My wife reckoned she could see the Opera Garnier, but that wasn't appearing on my nearest waypoint list either. I have a vague recollection that there was a sign we could see too, pointing us more-or-less back to where we'd come from. Which more or less tied in with the map that I was using at the time (from the hotel), where I was trying to get to the square box with Palais Royal written underneath it. In hindsight that appears to correspond to the "Tim Hotel", which doesn't appear in our tourist book that I can see. In the end we were too tired to continue, and went back to the elevator entrance to the metro (Pyramid). It looks like we got bloody close, and we might have even unwittingly seen a bit of the palace, either side of the Hotel de Louvre, assuming my assumptions are all correct. All we need now is a photo of the Hotel de Louvre taken from the Avenue de L'Opera entrance to Place Andre Malraux and see if we can see a bit of palace. We took the tube to the Latin Quarter. When we got out we were both disoriented. We wanted to go to the same place as we did on Saturday. I asked if we saw anything of significance there, and my wife remembered St Severin, so I punched it in and we were soon on our way there (after first walking the exact opposite direction before the compass kicked in!). A bit of wandering and we finally found a restaurant called La Harpe, 16 Rue de la Harpe (FROGLG) that sold both frogs legs and snails. Of course I made the obligatory "tastes just like chicken" remark - before I had even tried the frogs legs. We paid 99F each for a 3 course meal and there was no charge for the water. We then bumbled our way back to a Metro (I foolishly didn't mark the position of the metro we got out of, and was attempting to navigate back using just the recorded track. We then went to the Garue Norde metro to catch the Eurostar. Toilets in the Eurostar checkin area are free. We arrived at the UK side of the tunnel at about 18:00. If I had my time again, what would I do? I would have gotten my snails and frogs legs done on the first day at lunchtime instead of eating Vietnamese. Eaten at the Chinese restaurant both nights. Bought a carnet at the Eurostar stop. Gone to the Eifel Tower at night as well to see it lit up. Use a better route to get through the sights we did see, using GPS locations of bus stops and bus numbers, but using the metro for navigating places where the streets are too narrow in relation to the size of the buildings to get a GPS track. I wouldn't have bought the book "Eyewitness Travel Guides Paris", instead I would have bought the Lonely Planet one, we've had much better experience with it.