Paris - Day 1: Through the Chunnel

Monday morning we had to wake up pretty early to take the tube to the train station.  I got all packed and ready to go the night before so I was the first one ready to leave.  It was so hot in our room I just couldn't take it anymore so I went down stairs to wait.  While I waited I chatted with "Fizzy."  Him and his Uncle (who owns the hotel) were so nice to us the whole time and we really appreciated it.  The other's came down a short time later and we all made our way to the train station to get on our train that would take us under the water from London to Paris.
On our train ride through the Chunnel we had one stop where we had to get off our train and get on a new one.  We had about an hour wait in this town where we just hung out in the train station.  We did find a food cart where we bought some lunch from a very snooty woman who did not speak English and was annoyed that we even asked.  But this gave my mom her first opportunity to use her French.
My mom was so excited that we were in France and was totally geeking out.  It was pretty funny but neat too that she was so excited to do something that she had always wanted to do.  Ever since she took French in high school she wanted to visit France and now she was.  Pretty neat.
We got on our new train and continued on our journey toward Paris.  This train wasn't quite as nice as the first train we were on, but it wasn't bad.  We only had about an hour or so on this train.  We sat by a nice family from France that we chatted with for a while.

After we got to our station we found where the taxi's were located and then walked right out to a bunch of taxi's waiting to take people where they needed to go.  We got all our luggage packed into his trunk and then we all climbed in.  Turned out that we were kind of far from our hotel so it took us about 45 minutes or so to get there.  We were staying close to the Orly airport outside of Paris.
The taxi took us right to the hotel and we were able to check into our room.  We were all very grateful for that.  We were all really hot and tired.
Our room was small but nice.  Connie and my mom shared a large bed in the main area while Teagan and I stayed in smaller then twin beds up in a loft type area.  We had our own bathroom in our room and cool air, which we were all so happy about.
We were really hungry so Teagan looked up a place where we could go to dinner.  So we walked about 6 blocks away from our hotel just to find out it was closed and so were all other food places around us.  Turns out that restaurants don't open until 6:00 or 7:00 pm in France.  We did find a pastry shop open on our way back to our hotel so we stopped and bought four different types of pastry's and we all shared them.  My favorite was the strawberry tart - yummo!
After our treat we went back to our hotel to rest and hangout until the restaurant closest to our hotel opened.  The guy at the front desk told us that it opened at 6:00, but he was wrong.  We walked over there but it was still closed until 7:00.  So we went decided to walk around our hotel a little bit.  We found another pastry shop right next to our hotel and a cute little grocery store around the corner from our hotel.  It was so little and the people were so nice.
Then it was finally time to eat.  We were the first one's in the restaurant and we were so happy to be eating.  We were lucky to get a server who spoke a little English.  I got pizza (I wanted to compare with the pizza from Italy).  It was a good pizza and I enjoyed it.  After eating we were happy to be back in our hotel getting ready for bed.  We had a busy day ahead of us in Versailles the next day.