December 26th....all of Paris in one day?

We arrived on the 24th, saw a couple things and then the city shut down. The 25th - shut down again. We were to leave on the 27th for London, so that left us one day to run the gauntlet of everything we could get into the day...

First was Versailles, which again was easily accesible by RER. Versailles is a beautiful place, but was incredibly crowded. We took the "Audio tour" through the palace (imagine hundreds of tourists, all of whom have headphones on....quite amusing....) and then continued out to the gardens. I have a vague recollection of my last trip to Paris, which was during the summertime of 1991 I think, and wandering around all the gardens for ages. Not this time - it was cold. Incredibly cold. And the wind had picked up, which made it even colder. So we went out, walked around a bit, and then wound our way back towards the RER to get lunch and a train back into town.

When we got back to Paris, we stopped at the Arc de Triomphe (which we never did get to on our first day in town) and them went over to la Tour Eiffel, where we got to near sunset.
The Eiffel Tower is beautiful at sunset, though since we were in line for almost an hour, we didn't actually get to see the sunset from the tower, but it was nice nonetheless. :) After wandering around the first and second levels, we returned back towards our hotel, stopping to see Notre Dame and finding a place with FABULOUS French Onion Soup across the Seine with a great view of the cathedral.