GO UP THE EIFFEL TOWER

In this list of 100 Things To see And Do are no less than 6 involving France. That's why, in 2007, we were keen to take a short 4 day break in Paris so that we could tick some of them off.

What a disaster that turned out to be!

Whilst moving from St Pancras underground to another station we lost our holiday wallet out of Jacqueline's handbag. We were convinced it happened whilst travelling up an escalator and we lost :

£500 in Euros. Eurostar tickets, Hotel reservation, Passports Seine boat ride tickets, Moulin Rouge tickets and even our rail tickets to return home.

We had no option but to purchase rail tickets again and return home the same day.

Fortunately the company we had booked with, Railbookers, were able to get us a credit note for everything except the Euros, Passports, and the rail tickets home.

In April 2008 we tried again. We had anther stroke of luck. East Midland Trains who said they never reimbursed lost tickets took pity on us and gave us free first class return tickets to London. Our 4 day break was a success this time.

We were booked into the hotel Mercure Paris Tour Eiffel Suffren with this view from its door :

Off we went to ascend the tower:

I stupidly chose the wrong queue and found the queue we were in was walking only, no elevator. We had to switch queues and rode up to the first level :

Taking the lift again up to the higher level the views were much better :

The next photo is quite interesting :

The road you can see with the yellow arrow dips down under the bridge road. This was the route Henri Paul took when he was driving  Diana away from the Ritz Hotel. After we descended the Eiffel Tower we caught a taxi back to our hotel and asked him to take this route :

This is our taxi following the route

The next photo shows where their car hit the stanchion.

You can see scrape marks on the concrete pillars.