hello again 🙂 as I wrote last time, I wanted to start writing about my trips again on here so today we’re ready to jump into our Europe trip! This post will cover our first whole travel day, plus our arrival in Paris!
Day 1 – April 20, 2023
Wow it is absolutely wild that I’m writing this. Can we acknowledge that real quick? I haven’t posted on this blog regularly for years and now all of a sudden I get a huge wave of motivation to cover an entire trip. The mind is incredible.
Anyway. It’s travel time! Here’s the first video from this trip:
Something I forgot to tell you in the last post is that our travel situation can be a bit…complicated. Between the five of us in our travel group, we’re from three different cities in three different parts of the US – Chris and I live in Seattle, Sarah’s from Maryland and Brandon/Andy live in Iowa. Since we were traveling abroad we definitely wanted to be together for the long flight, so we quickly decided to meet up in one central location and all fly across the pond together.
So when Chris and I woke up at 3am on that Thursday, we were headed not directly to Paris but to…Chicago!
When planning our trip, we were deciding between a few cities to meet up in before we flew to Europe. Chicago ended up being a great choice because they had many direct flights to CDG for good prices, and all of us could fly direct there.
Our flight took off first and before we knew it I was enjoying my classic Alaska Airlines fruit and cheese platter.
We landed in Chicago around noon and met up with Sarah almost right away. We went and sat at our gate and were sooo excited when it showed our flight!
We had about a five hour layover so we got some food and waited for Brandy to show up. By the way, that’s their couple name.
After a few delays for weather and some brief panic, Brandon and Andy finally arrived to ORD with plenty of time before our flight to enjoy a Chicago hot dog. And before long we were on the flight!!!!!! It all started to feel real so fast once we were on!
We settled in pretty quick for our overnight flight. The screens on the back of the seats taught us some helpful French phrases:
We have several flight tracker girlies in the group so at least one of us was always keeping an eye on our status as well.
Here’s me and Sarah watching Daisy Jones:
Before too long we got our in-flight meals. They were pretty good! I mean, it’s airplane food…but it did the job.
And they gave us wine for free! I love flying internationally.
We tried (and failed) to settle in for some sleep. It was an 8 hour flight and we were going to land around 8:30 am, so we tried to catch some Zs…. it did not go super well. I think between the 5 of us we got a collective 3.5 hours of sleep. Here’s a goofy photo of Chris trying to sleep on my tray table though:
Day 2 – April 21, 2023
After I shut my eyes for what felt like 5 seconds it was time for the flight attendants to come around with our breakfast snack! It was a cute little bag of treats (read: a pastry and some yogurt).
And then just like that we were landing! The sunrise was beautiful and it was so unbelievable that we were there!!
We took our time getting off the plane (we knew we wouldn’t be able to check into our Airbnb until later) and went through customs. We were so excited to get our passports stamped!
We got these matching shirts from Etsy and they were so cute for our trip!
From there we found our way to an info desk and bought our train passes for the week. We bought the Navigo Easy pass for our four days in Paris, plus some RER tickets for the ride into the city. The train tickets were sort of confusing and hard to find research on, so maybe I’ll write a post or make a video about that separately. But we got them and we were on our way!
We went straight to our Airbnb to drop off our bags. And omg…getting into this Airbnb felt like we were in National Treasure for real. We had a code to get in the main door, then one to get through the foyer, then we had to figure out an old-timey elevator, then another code to get the key – it was so wild lmao it felt like we were on the Amazing Race. You’ll have to watch the vlog to see our re-enactment lol
We dropped off our bags and went to our pre-selected lunch spot. It might seem crazy that we planned out all our meals so precisely, but it actually was super helpful when we were all running on no sleep to have a specific place to go. Plus, with multiple dietary restrictions, we didn’t want to count on being able to just run into any café we saw. With all that being said, the spot we ended up for lunch was called Noglu!
As you can imagine from the name…this is a completely gluten free restaurant! The whole menu looked great, but we had our eye on one thing…
A GLUTEN FREE croque monsieur 🤤🤤 Our arrival day happened to be Sarah’s birthday so she had chosen our first meal, and we all agreed that the croque was a perfect choice for a first Parisian treat!
Many things on the menu were vegan too, so Andy got this yummy vegan bun:
Also, because of who I am as a person I took photos of every single menu we had on the trip. I won’t share all of them but just so you know there’s going to be some of those sprinkled in lol
After lunch we headed back to our Airbnb and it was ready! And perfect timing – we were so sleepy and delirious it was beyond time for a nap. Here’s a few pics of our place:
My favorite part was definitely our beautiful view!
This was the Airbnb we stayed in. I have absolutely no complaints, it was super nice and there was a metro station literally right outside our door which ended up being so convenient. I’d definitely recommend it.
We quickly settled into our beds and everybody took a nice jet lagged nap 😴
After waking up we enjoyed a few pastries we had gotten to go from Noglu. They were so yummy!
Our Airbnb was also right around the corner from a Lidl, so we popped in to get some groceries. Grocery shopping in other countries is so fun for some reason. And the baguettes were only 39 cents!!!!
We got some snacks and then headed out to see the one and only:
I know it’s not a hot take or anything but I love the Eiffel Tower so much, she’s so beautiful in person!
We took a bunch of photos and walked around for a bit. We planned to stay for a while until it got dark, because we wanted to see her sparkle ✨
There was a cute little market happening right on the riverbank, so we checked it out and picked up a few snacks.
We had plenty of time to find a good spot and it finally sparkled for us at 10 pm! It sparkles at the top of every hour after it gets dark, and only for about 5 minutes.
After a few more sparkly selfies we headed home.
And wrapped up the night with some snacks! We enjoyed the macarons we got at the market, plus some delicious snacks from Lidl – these rotisserie chicken chips were AMAZING??
And that’s all for our whirlwind first day in Paris! There’s SO much more to come – the next day was actually maybe our busiest of the trip, we walked about 23k steps 🫢 but I’m so excited to share everything we did!
I hope you enjoyed this post and keep an eye out for the next one!
xo 🩷 Kaela
