Paris, or at least the Eiffel Tower

I promised way back when that I would write about my trip to France. Of course it has taken me close to a month to sit down and write about my trip. This was definitely a business trip as I had very little time for sightseeing. I didn’t have a car or a window of time larger than an hour at a time to get out. I was in Paris for a training conference to join my company’s Environmental, Health, and Safety Internal Audit Team. I have mentioned before that I started to work for a French owned company in the middle of last year. Their corporate offices are in Paris, just blocks from the Eiffel Tower. My hotel was located about halfway between the tower and our offices. You can see the relative locations on this map. The red line is a rough course of my daily runs. I would do 2-3 laps around the gardens each day I was there.
I arrived on Monday and had about 4 hours to roam before dinner with the group. Had I known how much I would be able to visit the Eiffel Tower the rest of the week I would have been better served to try and get to the Louvre, Notre Dame, or the Arc de Triumph that afternoon. But no, I went to the Tower and walked the grounds all the way around, roamed a little into the city to the west, and came back along the river. This is probably the best of the pictures I took that day.
I was in class each day from 8:30 am to 6:00 pm and then would meet the group for dinner at 7:00. I squeezed my daily runs in that 6:00-7:00 pm window before dinner. Luckily it was actually meet at 7:00 in the hotel lobby for drinks, leave for the restaurant at 7:30. Since I wasn’t drinking, it was a good excuse to avoid the awkwardness of that social time to say I had to get a run in.

Although I didn’t see many sights, I did experience France in other ways. The food was excellent to say the least! I took a picture of my lunch one day because I got such a kick out of what they considered "Fast Food". Our lunch was brought in each day on these trays with food superior to 95% of American Restaurants. For dinner during the week I tried several different meals including: escargot, duck, "flat fish", and beef sirloin. Each of those was top notch. You add the yogurt, fruit desserts, excellent cheeses and breads, chocolate mouse, and other pastries to the mix, and I was in heaven. All the running in the world didn’t stop me from gaining several pounds while I was over there. Oh well, when will I get the chance to do that again?

As for some of the other pictures I have: of course the tower at night and a picture of me, at sunset, with the tower in the background taken from a deck at our corporate offices. I really didn’t get to see that much else. I saw the tunnel and monument where Princess Diana died so tragically. I saw the Arc from my taxi but wasn’t fast enough to get a picture of it. Same thing for the mini-Statue of Liberty they have commemorating the building of the real one given to the US. I did find it odd that the French don’t have a single TV channel with English programming like they did in both Spain and Hungary when I visited those countries.

All in all it was a great experience but one that left me wanting more. This is yet another place that I will return some day with my wife to share that experience with her. And for all the time I spent in and around the Tower, I never went up, because that is an experience I want to have with her.