Last few days of the trip! It’s so nice to look back over all the photos for these posts, we took over 800. Since it was the two of us there are a lot of selfies! I want to develop quite a few of them and put them in a nice album. Now that we do everything online, I feel like we’re losing the fun of looking through albums. Lately I have been developing hundreds of pics.
The second last day we went to this great cafe called L’atelier where we sat outside for breakfast in gorgeous weather.
Pain au chocolat and cappuccino!
I just loved the decor inside the restaurant, it was so charming and picturesque.
Then we hopped on the bikes and took a long ride to visit the Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, I had been so looking forward to this visit. Shakespeare and Company is an English language bookstore open in 1919 and it was a gathering place for Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. Today it sells new and used books and writers still come from around the world to write there, they stay in the bookstore on cots and just write all day and night. I am a big reader and my first degree was in English so I loved visiting this store. I wish you could take pictures inside so you could see how unique and charming it is.
There are so many side streets in Paris, every time you turn off one street you’re on another cobblestone side street full of cafes, shops and apartments. Just down the road from the bookstore was a street with a couple small cafes so we stopped for a glass of wine and dessert – we ate so much dessert on this trip! The place we went to was called The Tea Caddy, and even though the name of the cafe was English the staff did not speak a word! I pulled out the trusty phrasebook and dictionary and really had to rely on the French I could remember.
This little street was right near Notre Dame.
We then did a long bike ride around the city (to attempt to burn off some of the dessert) and went back for a day time visit to the Eiffel Tower. It was jammed!
This is one of my favourite pictures of the trip, definitely a framer.
That night we went to a restaurant we had been looking forward to for a few days. It was in the same building as the apartment we rented and in the airbnb page for the apartment, the restaurant was really well reviewed. Walking by it literally looks like a whole in the wall but when you go in it’s really sweet and is all fine dining, called Le Parc aux Cerfs. The food was the best we had the whole trip, my husband had the veal and said it was the best meal he’s ever had in his life.
We had quite a bit of wine there too! We then went across the street to Cafe Cubana, a bar/salsa club/cigar bar. The server only spoke Spanish and apparently when I’ve been drinking my University Spanish comes back to me! That night I spoke English, French and Spanish, first and probably last time I’ll ever be able to! I’m in love this red dress I wore that night.
The next day was our last day! So bittersweet. We spent the day as real tourists, biking around the city, taking a boat tour down the Seine, going to Moulin Rouge and Montmarte, and exploring the architecture we hadn’t yet seen. It was the only cold day of the whole trip. By this point we had been biking so much that I felt like I was doing multiple spin classes a day, so at every hill I just got off and walked it up – I got really lazy.
Montmarte cemetery. Jim Morrison, Leon Foucault, Olga Preobrajenska and many other famous names are buried here.
Moulin Rouge
This area is pretty sketchy, I probably won’t stay in Montmarte when I go to Paris again.
Boat tour down the Seine, it’s a great way to see Paris from a different perspective and go by the things you may not have had time to see.
We finished the day with one last trip to the Luxembourg Garden, it’s so beautiful there.
Thanks for everything Paris! Until next time!
Alex at Liberty 