Un long voyage vers Paris

Well, we're back in Europe.  There was less excitement this time around, and that is greatly appreciated, since for the next 88 days (90 in total, 2 down at this point) we'll be on the road, far from Michigan.

Erin's Dad was nice enough to drive us once more to Detroit for the first leg of our trip, a United flight to Washington Dulles.  From there, we took a Scandanavian Airlines "SAS" flight to Copenhagen, the first visit either of us had taken to Denmark.  We had some terrific fish and chicken for dinner, but the audio/visual system on the plane was acting up for a good bit of the trip - which was disapointing to James as he likes to watch in-flight movies.  While in the Copenhagenn airport, we stopped briefly to buy a postcard, and since Denmark does not use the Euro as its currency, we received back some of the more curious coins we've seen yet on our trip: the Danish "Kronor."

Erin posing with a Viking mannequin in the Copenhagen airport.

Soon we were back in the air, and were oddly bumped up into SAS's premium coach seating.  This, in turn, led to a traditional Danish breakfast:  We're still not sure what the grey rectangle represented.

The Danish breakfast we received in-flight. 

We touched down in Paris, and received our second passports stamp of the day (Danish, and now French).  We lost 6 hours due to the time change, or rather an entire night's sleep, so both of us were quite tired.

Waiting in the customs line at the airport in Paris.  It is evident that Erin did not get much sleep!

We made our way down to the Metro station, and navigated two train changes on our way to the Hôtel de Paris, where we will be staying for the next three days.  A brief nap followed, before we set out to explore our immediate neighborhood and plan for tomorrow.  Despite the beautiful weather outside, we were both very tired and decided to call it an early night.  On tap for tomorrow: a lot of walking, and some of the famous sights of Paris, including (we hope) Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower.

A Parisian woman riding a bicycle through the streets of Paris, high heels and all!

For our younger readers, we have some additional notes on our trip.  We are now strting to see alphabets that are different than English's.  For example, we saw some very different letters in advertisements hanging in the Danish airport:

We also saw some odd spellings in French text in Paris as well:

Finally, we received some questions about Tabitha and the trip in general.  First, Tabitha is doing well - better, in fact, than us when it comes to navigating "jet lag" - the feeling you get when you transfer many timezones in one trip.  Erin and I are also doing well on our "field trip" - and we hope that you are learning a lot just as we are.  For example, before we started this trip, we couldn't tell you that the River Liffey wended its way through Dublin, or that Castle Urquart was destroyed by its own protectors.  We hope to learn a lot more, and hope that you do as well.