Keeping Up With The Kerns: Paris...a love/hate relationship

Monday, July 21-Wednesday, July 23. Paris was not off to the best start. It was a girls trip with my mom and I and my friend Kate. We took the train to Paris on Monday morning and headed to our air bnb place. It was in a great location and the pictures looked good but when we got there it was FILTHY (dirty bathroom, gross stains all over the sheets and pillows etc. etc)! I have had one other bad air bnb experience before but not near this bad. We had even paid a cleaning fee and upon questioning the host, long story short his cleaning lady was sick and he thought he had done an ok job. He refused to get someone back to clean it so after at least 3 hours on the phone with an angry french man and air bnb we got our money back and were headed out to our new hotel.

I should mention that this was after we ventured out for lunch on our adorable street lined with tons of cafes and cute outdoor tables. While trying to decide on a restaurant a SEWAGE TRUCK stopped and started draining the sewage in the middle of lunch time rush putting the WORST smell you can inagine lingering in the air around tons of outdoor restaurants! I felt so bad for everyone sipping coffee, wine and having lunch that could no longer breathe! We had to RUN far away to get away from the awful stench! It was the most bizarre thing I have ever seen happen in the middle of the day on a busy street. Lunch itself was another situation...we were practically forced to dine and dash after our waiter was blatently ignoring us, refusing to bring us the check and ended up running out of the restaurant due to a baguette emergency...not to return. Needless to say... Our first day was not off to a great start.

When we arrived at the hotel we thought we would do our best to salvage the day so we headed to the Notre Dame area hoping for a night river cruise. We got directions from our hotel that turned out to be completely bogus, asked several ppl who spoke no English (or so they said) even tried to follow the boats to find the loading pier...NO LUCK! So with our tails between our legs we had a late dinner and called it a night. Needless to say I have no pictures from the first day.

Tuesday we were determined to make it a better day! We took the hop on hop off bus to explore the city making sure to hit all the main sites.

Notre Dame

Lock Bridge

Outside the Tuileries

Champs Elysees- Louis Vuitton

Arc de Triomphe

And of course the Eiffel Tower

Jumping picture fail!

The Opera House

After the hop on/hop off we took a cab to the Montmartre artist village. This is one my favorite spot in Paris. On a clear day it has the best views of the city and I just love the artist village and the wonding streets around the square.