Paris; Sunday, 30 October, 2016

After a much later alarm call and breakfast I checked out of the hotel and caught the metro up to Gare du Nord to drop off my luggage in the left luggage lockers there before heading over to the south side of the city with the intention of visiting the catacombs.

Unfortunately, it looked like everyone else had the same idea as the queue was massive and well past the two-hour mark so I abandoned that idea and instead headed for a slightly less creepy but equally odd subterranean attraction.

Up until the 1970s you could go on guided tours of the Paris sewer system that included boat rides through the larger tunnels. Those options aren’t available these days, but the Sewer museum is open and it’s possible to head down beneath the streets of the Quai d'Orsay to have a look around a small section of the actual sewer system (albeit mostly the storm drains and guttering system rather than the more human elements of the flows). The museum was very interesting, but with a very warm humid environment and the distinct smell that could only be described as sewage it was quite difficult to stay down for too long so in the end I did skip over some of the exhibits.

Back up on the surface in the clean air (or at least less smelly, but probably more polluted air) I went for a bit of a wander along the bank of the Seine taking in the views before crossing over towards the Grand Palais. I had intended on going inside to look at an exhibition, but the queues there were lengthy and looking across to the Petit Palais the same issue was happening there with queues (it turned out that a lot of sites had free entry for the day which would explain the very long queues.)

As it was such a nice sunny day, and as one was pulling up at the bus stop as I approached it, I decided to get on one of the hop-on-hop-off open-top bus tours of Paris to take in the sites (that were mostly of lengthy queues outside all the major museums) of the city and did a full lap of the tour.

The tours start and end at the Eiffel Tower and back there at the end of a full circuit I realised that I didn’t have enough time to visit anything else, so instead I stayed on the bus round to the Arc de Triomph and then headed down into the metro to get the train back to Gare du Nord to pick up my luggage and then check-in for my train back to London.

Earlier in the day the station had been evacuated as someone had tried to take an unexploded WWI shell through. The service had been playing catch-up all day and the queues for security were pretty lengthy. By the time I finally got through they were calling my train so I headed straight down onto the platform and found my seat.

The return journey was significantly smoother than the outbound and we even arrived back into London a few minutes ahead of schedule, but as it was late and there had been quite a bit of disruption over the previous few weeks to Eurostar services I’d decided not to risk a very late night trip back across London and had booked into the Premier Inn on the Euston Road, and so less than 20 minutes after leaving the train I was turning in for the night ready to complete the last 8 miles of my journey home the following morning after a good nights sleep.