Paris by Bike: A Boy’s Eye View (Guest Post)
You’re in Europe. You’re with family. The inevitable “shopping day” appears. This always means it’s time for the Afeboys to fend for themselves. We embraced the challenge and fought the desire to sleep in and watch Game of Thrones on our iPads. Westeros culture could wait.
The two boys and I decided on the Musee de l’Armee (in English, the Army Museum). I figured anything with ‘army’ was a good idea. Beautiful place, the boys embraced the idea with their patented brand of Afeboy goofiness (see: photo with hats) and we embarked. Turned out, this ‘museum’ really was an 19th century VA old soldiers home. Not exactly full of the gripping tales of bravery. But, it was beautiful (leave it to the French to make an old folks home beautiful). And Napoleon was buried there.
Bonaparte had this idea that his grave should be viewed from above so people were forced to bow their heads when observing. Not the kind of thing I’d be thinking about in my last days, but I never conquered Europe either. Apparently this tomb was a favorite of Hitler, supporting the theory that he tried to conquer Europe just to visit the historical sites. Thankfully, he skipped over the part about Napoleon’s disaster in Russia and the rest is history.
Paris gave us another beautiful day. I found it especially beautiful since I arrived the day before from Ireland where the weather varied between “heavy rain” and “less heavy rain”. We came up with the idea to grab a Velib’ bike and bike through the streets, stop and have crepes, and then visit my dad in the hospital. My recommendation: this is a must. Cheap, fun, easy to do, lots of bike paths. Negatives: requires a modicum of shape. The two boys, with finely honed ‘gamer bodies’, found that biking up any incline required something called ‘physical effort’. Also, while Velib’ rentals are all over the place (something like 20,000 bikes and 1,800 rental stations), and navigating the rental kiosks is easy, not all of the bikes are in the greatest shape, and there’s no helmet rental available.
As an added bonus, a French woman cursed us out as we rented our bikes. I’m pretty sure our only crime was being slightly pudgy Americans. But good to know that the ‘middle finger’ translates to other countries.
So we pedaled along the Seine and through the Louvre, stopped and found the most expensive crepes in Paris ($18 dollars for a pancake), and went up ONE hill to the hospital, where the boys collapsed next to their grandfather who warmly declared they were a pair of weenies. Overall, excellent Afeboy day.
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Our itinerary contains links to the sights we saw and our other blog posts about the trip.
Trip date: July 2015
Kids’ ages: Jonny 15 & Emma 13 (plus cousins ages 16 & 14)