Paris, France

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 slights 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!

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 so far.