Paris Trip - Day 1

As I mentioned back in January, my parents decided that it would be nice for us to meet them in Paris in the Spring.  So after months of careful preparations my parents landed in Paris on April 1st at around 10am.  They had a few problems getting from the airport to the apartment that we had booked in Boulogne Billancourt.  First of all, Boulogne is just outside of Paris and therefore most airport shuttles will not go there.  My parents had to wait 30min for a shuttle at Charles de Gaule aiport that took them as far as the metro station Charles de Gaule Etoile.  Then they had to haul all their luggage into the metro station and purchase tickets.   I don't know why, but ticket machines are never intuitive.  A very nice young women dressed like a metro employee with name badge and all, offered to help them purchase a ticket.  She suggested they buy a 5 day pass so that they would not have to worry about buying tickets all the time.  Each pass was around €35 so the women kindly bought two passes for them with her credit card and then gave my parents the tickets in exchange for €70 cash.

Tickets in hand, my parents took the metro and made their way to the apartment we had rented.   Well, it was not until the next morning when they attempted to use their metro passes again that they realized that something was wrong.  My mother's pass didn't work.  They checked with the man working at the ticket office and he confirmed that the ticket she had was a one-time child's fare worth €0,70.  It is easy to understand how they could have been tricked.  They had already travelled 14 hours by plane, waited for a shuttle bus and then jet-lagged and weary they had to figure out the Paris subway system.  I'm sure that most tourists would have happily accept help from a friendly local.  Anyways, live and learn.

The rest of us arrived in Paris/Beauvais airport at around 9:40pm.  I was actually able to book a private airport transfer to our apartment in Boulogne through http://www.bluvan.fr/.  I was really glad that we did, because we got door to door service for €140 for 6 people.  Our driver met us as soon as we came off the plane and we got to our apartment in around 1 hour.   By some stroke of good luck, my dad just happened to be in the lobby of the building when our Bluvan pulled up.  That was fortunate, because we actually didn't have any way of contacting my parents to let them know we had arrived.

The apartment was a nice, modern, very clean with one bathroom and two bedrooms.  There were two sofa-beds in the living room and this is where the kids slept.  We reserved through Airbnb and paid around €1000 for 6 nights.  Seeing that we were 8 people staying there, I'm not sure that we could have gotten a better deal anywhere. The hosts were very accommodating of our schedule too.  They waited for my parents to arrive in the morning and also allowed us to stay past 6pm the day we left.

Inside our Paris apartment