re: #205 HoosierHoops

Thank you so much Walter..I printed it out..I’m excited about visiting the city of lights.. I’ll leave Friday from Amsterdam and drive to Paris..I need to find a really cool Hotel Downtown….I prefer walking or Buses when visiting places..
I want to drive through the wine region of France.. As you know I’m a Napa Valley boy…And it was always Napa, France,Napa,france blah blah..We make better wine than you….
Any ideas on a hotel?

If you’re only spending a weekend, you may not have time for all that driving. You’ll be coming down from the north. I don’t know about the wine regions of the north (are there any), I have spent most of my time in Paris and eastern France, not north, south or west. Of course east, you have Burgundy (La Bourgogne) and the whole Cote’ de Or valley, all the way down south.

Stay, well, I stay cheap, so I can’t give you any recommendations for central Paris places. But if you want small, cheap and non-touristy, then go for anything in the 12th district. Try streets like Rue de Lyon, Rue Parrot, anything in that area. Lot’s of 2 star places. And just a few blocks from Garde de Lyon (big train station), where you can get the Metro (subway), a lot of different lines come in there. Do try buses, kind of confusing in Paris.

If you are only going to be there for a weekend, you will probably be most interested in things to see along Metro Line 1 (yellow) it goes east to west, and stops at places like Bastille, St. Paul, Hotel d’cite (city hall, Notre damn), Louvre, Arc de Triomphe. la Defense etc. If you stay in the 12th district, you can get Line 1 at Gare de Lyon, go up and down the line and see all sorts of stuff in one day.

Get a Metro map BEFORE you leave, and see where that Yellow Line 1 goes. It really hits most of the high points of Paris (except the Tour Eiffel).

And of course, Google maps and Google earth helps a lot. You can get Metro maps online for free, print them out. Gee, if I knew you were going earlier, I could have just planned the whole thing out for you LOL.