20 August Paris

This is it, we made it! The official end of our tour.

We get up early for a photo in front of the Eiffel tower before the traffic gets up. It is a magic morning and we decide to take a couple of spins around the Arc de Triomphe for a laugh. But alas a police car sees us and turns on his lights and chases us around. They then pull out their batons and wave them  at us… uh oh we’re in for it. Then they pull up next to us and… they are all laughing! They wave us off with good wishes. Bastards.

We head back to the hotel to spend our last day together sightseeing. We go to the Paris Catacombs which are just up the road from our hotel. There are some 4 million souls buried here. Their bones have been stacked in the old limestone quarries under the roads. This is where they quarried the stone for the buildings up top. It is pretty macabre but very interesting and well worth the visit. The air is rank still with rotting bones. I have a coughing fit when we hit the warm air at the surface. 

We then  take another “death by a thousand paper cuts” bus tour. Slow and hot. But we get a quick glimpse of the major sights. Lunch on the riverside under the Eiffel Tower watching the thousands queue to go up.  We even see a couple of maori and stop to say hello. The first we have seen in months. Our last dinner is without Uncle Maurice as he has hit the town to see a Moulin Rouge type show.