Au revoir Peugeot and bonjour Paris!

What amazing good fortune that we had to return the car on a Sunday.  It was quite a hair raising drive from Chandeloup-en-Brie to our apartment in Paris!  Our GPS was giving very last minute instructions in the (relatively) heavy traffic which led us to making a few wrong turns. We had a few near misses - I thought it would be very unfair if we had an accident on the last day of our lease!  We found the apartment OK.  It's in Pigalle, our nearest metro is Abbess.  (It is famous for having so many stairs up from the metro that everyone takes the enormous lift!).  We are on the second floor but do, as promised, have a view of the Tour Eiffel - as you will see by the photos!  Bella was shocked at how tiny our one bedroom apartment is, but its the size Greg and I expected.  Space is tight in Paris! We are about 3km from the Louvre but it's all uphill!  The walk up from the metro is very good for our quads I'm sure. We dropped off our luggage, then our next challenge was to get to CDG airport to drop off the car.  We rang them for instructions but despite that struggled to find the car return lot - CDG is a small city in itself!  So after few roundabouts and a few more phone calls (thank goodness for our travelsim card!) and a few tense words between Greg and I, we made it.  We even managed to find a car cleaning place on the way.  I didn't think we needed to clean the car as I'm sure it's comprehensively serviced, however Greg felt it was the least we could do for the car.  I must admit my side, where I had been preparing the car picnics, was pretty grotty!  Anyway it looked quite presentable and we returned it all, except the spare key - safely hidden in the computer bag.  Rats.  We have one week to post it back (and forgot yesterday, good start!) before we are fined.  We were both sad and relieved to leave the car.  Sad because it was a lovely car, but relieved we no longer had to worry about traffic.  Just metros and trains from now on (except for one week in Scotland when we have a hire car).
So back into Paris and to our apartment.  It feels very cool to be "living" in Paris for six days.  Greg has loved the cooking show "My little French kitchen" and now he has the chance to work in his own little French kitchen!  Our kitchen is about 4 square metres, about the size of a generous table cloth! For our first night he cooked the cheese and sausage we'd bought at the Dijon markets and we ate it with a crusty baguette.  The French really do make the best bread!  Cooking the cheese (as recommended by our cheese merchant in Dijon!) made it like a fondue :-)  So 70s!  But delicious.  Oh, and wine of course.  Greg found a bottle of Mumm bubbles he couldn't pass up and unfortunately Bella, whose taste usually leans towards spumante, liked it too!
Yesterday we spent the day at the Louvre.  We had wanted to do the Fat Tyre bike tour but Liam is not 100% so thought wandering around a museum might be a bit easier.  In retrospect, probably not much easier as we travelled about 20kms on foot through this enormous museum.  The audio is now a 3DS, so not only does it give you verbal but also photographic instructions in 3D!!  Doesn't get better than that, does it?  Liam was pretty thrilled.  We did a couple of tours on the 3DS's.  I loved that they even give you appropriate footfall noises as you walk between exhibits!  So the kids got to crowd in and see the Mona Lisa.  There is always such a crowd in front of that picture!  And predictably, they were a little disappointed, although we'd warned them that it was small and you couldn't get that close!  We all felt a bit shattered last night and the idea of rotisserie chicken and roast veggies was very appealing.  Greg bought the chook (choking at paying 16 euro for a cooked chook!) and prepared the veggies, it was delicious.  So nice not to have to go out when we all felt so tired.  I think we're still exhausted from Eurodisney!  Liam is still running a temperature but we still hope to do the bike tyre tour today.... can't let a little sickness slow you down!