Day Two…

Trains.
Schedules.
Buying tickets (for ten people) into Paris.
Language barrier.

Somehow, all of the obstacles were overcome and we made it onto the train and off to the Eiffel Tower.  Things were going great.  We knew there would be some snags along the way…
So, other than the usual odd smells that your nose might pick up on a vehicle of mass transit in a foreign country, the first trip into the City of Lights was uneventful.  We reached our stop and got off.  As we quickly found out, just getting off the train before the doors closed turned out to be a big production at times due to the number of people, ages of kidlets, and…

A stroller.

As we walked out of the exit of the train station, we looked around and saw no tower.  Looked at the map and it said to walk north, so we did.  Still no tower.  Hmmmm. The map was insisting that we were practically on top of it!  At the last second, we came out around an office building and There! it was…  And… as every other tourist was doing, we had to take pictures of our first sighting – not knowing, of course, that where we were standing was probably the worst location for photographing the structure possible.  Course, you didn’t know that until you walked another 100 feet or so.

Next time we go there, we will just push our way past the ogling newbie tourists like so many other people were… muttering quite loudly under their breath at our oohs and ahhs as they elbowed their way through the knot of bodies.