Paris, France

Paris, the City of Love, or the City of Lights, is one of the most dreamed-of destinations of many people throughout the world. I have been to Paris a few times, most recently in March of 2025. I have never visited Paris in the summer, but my winter and spring-time visits have usually yielded rain, and on one occasion, snow!

There are many must-see destinations when visiting Paris, and I will write about a few:

* The Eiffel Tower

* The Palace of Versailles

* Notre Dame Cathedral

* The Arc de Triomphe

* The Paris Opera House

* The Flame of Liberty

* The Statue of Liberty in Paris

* The Paris Temple

Notre Dame de Paris

Notre Dame was destroyed by a horrific fire in 2019. In December of 2024, the doors opened to visitors once again. We visited the interior of Notre Dame in March 2025 by making a reservation on their official website: Notre Dame de Paris

Construction continues on the exterior of Notre Dame

The Blessed Virgin and Child Jesus marble statue

The Virgin of the Pillar, or Virgin of Paris, which was returned to Notre Dame in November of 2024 after being removed following the 2019 fire.

My blog post about Notre Dame is here: Notre Dame

The Statue of Liberty on Pont de Grenelle

The Statue of Liberty in Paris is 1/4 size of the actual Statue of Liberty in New York. It was given to Paris in 1885 by citizens of the United States who lived in Paris. There are three replicas of the Statue of Liberty that can be seen in Paris. The one I visited in March of 2025 was at the end of the man-made island in the Seine River that can be accessed by climbing down the stairs of the Grenelle Bridge. It is 9 meters high and now its base is covered with graffiti.

My post about the Statue in Paris is here: Statue of Liberty Paris

My 2024 Visit to Paris:

My mom has always wanted to go to Paris, so I tried to fit it into the end of our Mediterranean Cruise. We were only in Paris for a short time because we had an overnight layover in Paris on our flight home from Rome. We reserved a hotel room at the Hotel Eiffel Seine, which is about a block away from the Eiffel Tower. Our plane landed at nearly 11 p.m. and we had to figure out how to use the ticket machines for the metro. Through trial and error we were able to purchase round trip tickets on the metro. However, since it was so late at night, the map that we had studied to reach our hotel was of no use, because one of the metro lines shut down. We were lucky enough to find some metro workers who were leaving work at midnight and gave us a round-about way that we could still reach the Eiffel Tower metro stop even though the more direct line had shut down. We finally made it to our stop and I put the hotel address in my phone, but my GPS sent us all over the place - when we reached what the GPS thought was the destination, it was definitely not our hotel! I called the hotel and he went out on the road to try to find us, but we were nowhere in sight, because we were quite far from the hotel by then. I had our GPS take us back to the Eiffel Tower, and we finally found the hotel, which was right next to the metro stop exit. Lesson learned -- we should have taken a taxi in the first place! I just thought it would be too expensive because the Eiffel Tower is about an hour from the airport. But, there aren't escalators in the Paris metro so we were dragging our suitcases up and down several long flights of stairs at each metro stop, plus dragging them around Paris in the dark and rain - it was not fun! During the day, and when you aren't lugging suitcases around, the Paris metro will work fine. But if it's late at night, and you have luggage, use a taxi! Or better yet, an uber!

The Hotel Eiffel Seine was under construction when we were there, but our room was nice. We got there about 2 a.m., and had to leave by 6 a.m. to ride the metro back to the airport to catch our connecting flight. The only thing we saw in Paris was the Eiffel Tower, in the dark and rain, so that was my only experience with Paris up to that point. Also, since it was so late at night, the Eiffel Tower was no longer lit-up.