Paris Travel Diary

After a week in England, we boarded the Eurostar to the city I’ve been dreaming of visiting my entire life. Paris ✨

As cliche as it sounds, Paris truly was a dream come true. We hit the jackpot with the perfect Airbnb that gave us the perfect Parisian experience.

I’ll keep this short, because the vlog and photo diary shows the Paris we came to love much better than I could ever write.

Watch the travel vlog here:

Things to do – first time in Paris

I truly underestimated how I’d feel the first time I saw the Eiffel Tower. Perhaps the most recognisable landmark in the entire world, I didn’t expect to be so excited when I finally saw it in real life! Paris really put on a show that day, and with cloudless, bright blue skies, it looked like a green screen. Jade and I both facetimed our parents and surprised them with a view of the Eiffel Tower towering behind us. An unforgettable moment!

Bucketlist items:

Admire all the tourist sites: Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, The Louvre, Seine River
Live your Moulin Rogue dreams in Montmartre
Stay in a Parisian style apartment
Spend a day at Disneyland Paris
Do a day trip to the Palace of Versailles

While I wouldn’t change a thing about our time in Paris, but the time we left, we were starting to feel tourist fatigue. There’s only so many museums you can cram into one week before they start to feel monotonous!

Stay

Like London, Paris is very well connected by public transport. As long as you’re near a metro station, you’ll be good. That said, everyone has an opinion on the best area to stay and there’s lots of resources out there. When we were researching accomodation, we found it really overwhelming. We haven’t used Airbnb much, and I’ve heard many horror stories lately so I almost cancelled our Airbnb and booked an exorbitantly priced hotel instead. BUT, I’m so glad I’m kept it because Eric’s Place ended up making our Paris experience AMAZING!

I can’t recommend this place more, but I’ll let my Airbnb review speak for itself:

We stayed at Eric’s for 5 nights and absolutely loved it. The location was perfect, we felt very safe, close to many metro lines and within walking distance to Notre Dame and the Louvre. Being on the main road of St Germain, there was plenty of shops, restaurants and cafes to explore but it was still very quiet inside the apartment.

The apartment was very well set up with all the essentials we needed. The full kitchen, dishwasher and washing machine made the stay even more comfortable.

It was located on the top floor of five flights of stairs (we knew this) which was a great daily workout. Eric helped bring up our suitcases on arrival.

We highly recommend this place as a central location to explore Paris. Eric was a fantastic host.

Transport

We all know that airports are chaotic at the moment, and we wanted to save both time and money as well as reduce the chances of losing our luggage. So we took the Eurostar from London to Paris. Unfortunately, we left on the weekend of the Queen’s Jubilee so the terminal was chaos and we were delayed. But it was so much nicer to jump on a train than a flight. The train journey takes about two hours.

A handy element of Paris’ public transport system is the weekly metro pass. This includes unlimited metro and train rides within the city but also includes trips to places like Disneyland and the Palace of Versailles, making transport very affordable.