We went to Paris in 2003 for Christmas.  This trip we will get to experience Paris in the summer.

The only direct flight from Calgary to Paris is on the charter airline, Air Transat, so that’s how we’re going.  We leave at 3:55 pm and arrive in Paris the next morning at 9:00.

Since this is a return visit, we hope to see some of the areas of Paris we missed the first time and revisit some favourite museums.  Paris is divided into 20 arrondissements.  The 1st is the area of the Louvre, then the numbers move outwards in a clockwise circular fashion like a snail shell.  Most of the interesting areas are in the single digits.  The Eiffel Tower is in the 7th, Notre Dame and Centre Pompidou in the 4th, Latin Quarter with the Jardin de Luxembourg, Sorbonne University and the Panthéon in the 5th, L’Arc de Triomphe in the 8th, Musée d’Orsay in the 6th.

Robin is living in the 11th, called the Bastille, the area where the French Revolution is considered to have started, although no remnants of the Bastille prison exist.  Now there’s just Place de Bastille with a column called Colonne de Juillet (July column) as a monument to the Revolution.

We will be staying in a flat on Île Saint–Louis, the island next to Île de la Cité, where Notre Dame is situated.

No tourist attractions are on Île Saint-Louis but its central location should allow us to walk to many of the places we want to visit.  According to Google maps, it is a 15 minute walk to Robin’s flat.  In my experience, Google maps calculate the time for walking on the assumption it will done at an Olympic pace, but still, it should be fairly easy to walk between the flat where we’re going to be staying and Robin’s Paris home.

Weather forecast is for rain when we arrive.