It IS possible to see most the iconic sites of Paris in just one day – in fact, in less than 12 hours. You won’t sit much, even to eat, but it is possible. I didn’t even wear sneakers, though decent pain meds would be recommended. We were also still struggling with bad jet lag, which meant that I had been spending from 3:00 am to nearly 6:00 am each night staring at the ceilings. I think we probably could have gotten in even more had we been able to start earlier in the morning, and if we had bought tickets beforehand. Buying tickets beforehand could save some time with priority access, but some sites didn’t allow priority access through the security lines, which still meant we had to wait up to 30 minutes in some lines, but would have saved another 30 minutes in others.
We ended up walking 10 miles that day, here’s the proof from my Fitbit.
Here’s how we did it:
In the morning, took Birds (rentable electric scooters) from our hotel in Bercy down to the Pantheon. We just took pictures from the outside:
There was some sort of festival being set up outside, but we turned around and saw the church of Saint Etienne du Mont with the doors open. We had forgotten it was Sunday and walked in (thankfully quietly) into a mass. The church was built in the 15th and 16 centuries and contains the shrine of St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris.
From the Pantheon, we walked the streets to Notre Dame, which is still closed due to the fire earlier this year that destroyed the roof and the spire:
Next up, we walked down to Sainte-Chappelle, here we heard many people complaining of waiting in line for security with their priority passes. Once through security, though, the line for priority was non-existent, and we waited a bit longer to buy tickets. However, the wait was worth it to walk into the Holy Chapel to see this:
I just could not get over the beauty of all the details of the church. There’s a lower chapel, then the famous upper chapel, which you could get to from a set of spiral staircases. We walked up in to the chapel twice, just to get that breath taking view as you climbed up the last few steps into the nave.
Next up, we waited in line at the Louvre. Again, everyone had to wait for the security line, but then once in the main museum, we had to wait again for tickets. Worst part is that we were standing in the heat of the sun, high humidity, sweating like crazy, and finished all the water we had in our bottles.
We power walked through the museum, avoiding the crowds around the Mona Lisa, instead seeking out the quiet and air conditioned parts.
Perhaps my most favorite parts were either the Palace of Darius, or the Stele of Hammurabi, which I recognized just walking into the room and gasped at seeing, as it was something I had studied in my history of art classes in college.
One thing to note about the museum is that when it’s busy, the women’s bathrooms are an utter mess. We found one small restroom on a far side of the museum, waiting in line, doing the pee dance, only to get in and find the restroom out of paper.
After only an hour and a half, we called the Louvre quits and took the subway to the Arc de Triumphe. It was pretty gratifying to come up the escalator from the train station and be greeted by the monumental site:
Again, we didn’t take the time to go up the Arc, but took pictures from the outside and sat underneath the Arc and watched the insane craziness that is the round-a-bout.
At the Arc, we took a short bus ride down to the Eiffel Tower. The bus dropped us off almost right underneath the tower, but we walked back almost to the last stop to get a cliche shot:
Again, we didn’t go up the tower, instead, we booked it for the Catacombs, which closed at 8:30. We thought showing up at 6:30 would be an easy ticket in, but waiting in line, we were told that it was “at least an hour from this point” and the last entry was allowed in at the latest at 7:30. We waited that full hour, only to have the rope pulled in front of us at just 7:27, nail biting waiting to be let in. Finally, the security announced just 10 more people to be let in. We were number three and four.
The hour wait was well worth it, though the catacombs was a good percentage of mysteps and stair numbers on my Fitbit ( counted 110 steps up out of the catacombs).
The catacombs started as simple medievel quarries to build medieval France. The city got built up around them, until they started caving in and concerning the citizens above in the late 1700s. Around the same time, the cemeteries of Paris were filling up and causing health concerns. The obvious decision was to take the remains of the people in the mass graves of the hospitals and shelters, and other cemetaries, and stack them up. Complete with morbid decorations:
As we had eaten our lunch and dinner walking or waiting in line, we grabbed a charcuterie at a local bar near our hotel:
