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Day 9: June 2, 2024
Today we drove back to Paris, stopping to see Chartres Cathedral on the way. Chartres is the best preserved Gothis cathedral in Europe, and it has managed to avoid being dsamged in any of the wars that have gone on around it over the centuries. Locals believe this is due to the holy relic that made it a pilgrimage site since medieval times - the veil Mary was wearing when the angel announced to her that she would bear Jesus (or was it when she gave bitrh to Him? Nobody seems quite sure!)
We arrived back in Paris, checked into our hotel then went into Paris centre on the RER train. The group wanted to go on a boat ride and go up the Eiffel Tower (as it had been too wet to stand in line outside on Wednesday night). On the way in, I decided that there would probably not be time to go up the Eiffel Tower before dinner, and that the lines would probably not be so long later. So we headed first for the Bateaux Parisiens, the boats that go down the River Seine, where they had an hour's river cruise, seeing a lot of teh sights we weren't able to see from the bus, because so manhy roads are closed for the construction of venues for the Olympic Games. The we went for dinner at Flams a chain of restaurants making Flammkueche, a speciality from the Alsace region of France - it looks like a sort of pizza, but doesn't taste like one!
After dinner we went back to the Eiffel tower - and all of those who wanted to managed to get tickets to teh top floor of the tower and went up there. We had a shuttle bus to take us back to our hotel.