12 Hours & 18 Miles in Paris

The fifth time I traveled to Paris was for the daylight portion of a single day, sandwiched between a trip to Barcelona and London. This day was perhaps the most stimulating concentrated travel experience I have had, in a city that I had become familiar with over the course of several years. The Europe trip materialized as Joe and my first trip abroad together and involved visiting a friend of mine, Kimberly, in Spain and his family in the UK. It was my genius idea to fly from Barca to Paris in the morning and hop on the Eurostar train to London that evening as a method of transporting ourselves from the first part of the trip to the last. I took the opportunity to draw up an original map with Amanda's Walking Tour of Paris for the occasion and mentally plotted out how we could possibly capture multifaceted Parisian life in one day alone. 

Each time I had visited Paris in the past, my connection with the city changed a bit. Similar to how I felt about visiting New York City after moving from NY to Virginia as a teen, and before moving back to attend NYU. The nostalgic appreciation for the place and its offering of activities to indulge in became more profound each visit, while additional curiosities were formed. My first time in Paris was for my 13th birthday with my Danish grandmother who, with her career as a multilingual PanAm flight attendant and later as the wife of the US Ambassador to Australia, instilled the priority of travel in me from the start.

The second time, I was 16 with my best friend and a few of our family members. The third, I was 17 with my high school foreign language class. The fourth, I was 21 and flew to Paris not knowing a soul in the city to spend a summer studying at the Sorbonne, of which my grandmother is an alumnus. This time, with Joe, would be my moment to take someone through a place that had informed my interests and pursuits for as long as I could remember.

The Kellners are walkers. On an interview for the company that would become my first job after university, when asked to name a hobby, I quickly and genuinely answered "walking". Striding around New York - whether as a means of transportation or just to clear the mind - has led me to intimately know many NY neighborhoods that I have never lived near. My brain functions a bit smoother, I've come to realize, when my body is in stable motion. In the context of travel, I maintain that the best way to get to know a place is to get lost wandering in it.

That said, even I was shocked to see the number on the Fitbit at the end of our day in Paris. 18 miles! Short of getting to and from the airport and train station, all of this walking was completed in Paris. I take pride in this number, 18 miles, as if it proves that I was able to show an important person in my life a complete picture (as complete as possible in a day) of the key monuments and details of this special city.

We flew into Orly airport and hopped the RER B commuter rail, straight past the Cité Universitaire stop where I had dutifully boarded the train to French phonetics class the summer of my 21st year. We stored our luggage in an hourly locker at the Gare du Nord train station (not as easy to find as I remembered from 4 years before due to construction) and the clock was officially ticking.

My walking tour began in a little spot I had flagged long ago for la prochaine fois that I would be in France. The Musée de la Vie Romantique has a garden cafe that called my name on that warm autumn day. We found it hidden in a small street near Pigalle. Though the breakfast options were scarce by the time we arrived, I luxuriated in the chic simplicity of a slightly stale croissant and steaming cafe au lait. 

Fueled by coffee and a newfound sense of French enlightenment we headed to Sacré-Cœur, the famous church atop the hill of Montmartre. This involved a bit of hiking and certainly accounted for a sharp increase in our step count. I chose not to share with Joe that there is a vehicle that can transport visitors to the top of the hill (what fun would that be) so we traversed the old Montmartre streets, ascending to the first of many beautiful views during our day. Against a high blue sky, Sacré-Cœur looked to me as if it might fit more appropriately on a cliff overlooking the sea in Athens or even Istanbul with its dome shapes reminiscent of the city's skyline of mosques, minus the minarets. 

The Place des Vosges in the hip Marais district holds a certain fascination for me with its royal aura suggesting a hint of the Parisian nobility that used to gather here. We grabbed a small sandwich and placed ourselves among the students scattered around the lawn.

Wandering from the rive droite to the rive gauche of the Seine I lost my sense of direction for a moment, absorbed in the tranquility of the cobblestone side streets. This landed us on a bridge that was not quite the Pont Notre-Dame, but a few blocks further east. Ah well, the beauty of Paris is the particular way the city can reveal a new side of itself. I outstretched my arm, pointed towards the back facade of the building, and "showed" Joe the famed Notre-Dame cathedral. 

Several Sorbonne classes were centered around the Panthéon in the Latin Quarter. The summer I studied here, my routine was to pick up my daily chocolate croissant (for reference, a fraction of the size of one you might find in New York) and my petite to-go coffee and sit on the steps of the Panthéon, looking straight out at the Tour Eiffel.

Easily my favorite of Paris' gardens, we stopped at the Jardin du Luxembourg to rest our tired feet about halfway through the day. There are so many nooks and crannies in this park where you can pull up a chair and observe the bustling city life and impeccable landscaping. The boxy trees that line the gardens remind me of life size Alice in Wonderland props.

Of course the Louvre can't be missed. With our time restrictions, the best we could do was re-cross the Seine after a jaunt through the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood and visit the outside of the building. We commented on its grandiose size and took a moment to appreciate the modern I.M. Pei pyramid and the centuries old palace that surrounds it. Luckily we will be making a visit to the new Louvre Abu Dhabi in March of 2018, and this time we will enter the building! Without a doubt, we will need to return to Paris (I would have liked to anyway) to dive deeper into the sites we saw.

There was an attempt made to walk down the Champs-Élysées to see the Arc de Triomphe but upon realizing that time was running out, we diverted our path back to the river, down the Avenue de New York. The grand finale of our walking tour, La Tour Eiffel. Settled into a soft grassy patch, in the company of visitors from around the world, we took in the tower. The sky could not have provided a more perfect canvas for the Eiffel Tower to sit upon. All blue with puffs of cloud and the iron structure jutting straight up. It stood as proud as I felt after accomplishing such a hectic, rewarding, micro-travel experience.