Fantastic long weekend in Paris for the Olympics!
We booked an early Friday morning Eurostar but woke up to news of sabotage on the French High Speed network. Luckily the disruption wasn’t too bad and we were only delayed by about an hour or so.
We arrived in Paris and found our way to our apartment. It was a nice evening so we headed down for the opening ceremony by the river, security was as expected very serious so took a while to get through the checkpoint but we got through and found our seats. Discovered that the Olympics events were dry so had a Kronenberg zero while we sat and watched the boats go by. The ceremony was incredible and so well put together and the highlight from our view point was the fireman and police display on ladders and gymnastics. The rain started to come and we got absolutely soaked. All of us except Juli didn’t have coats and then started to get cold too. We watched all the boats go by and then walked back to our apartment.
Saturday morning we had tickets for the beach volleyball. The weather was slightly overcast but was great fun and the phrase Monster Block will be in our family’s lexicon for a long time. The volleyball was great with an amazing atmosphere and the stadium that was built right by the Eiffel Tower was awesome.
On Sunday we had tickets for basketball and swimming but we discovered that the basketball was actually in Lille (rather than in Paris as we’d expected) and so would take hours to get there on the high speed train (which were still heavily impacted by the sabotage) and e-train tickets seemed super expensive so we decided to skip it. Instead we bought tickets to go up the Eiffel Tower which was great and had champagne at the top with a view over the volleyball arena we had been to the day before.
Sunday afternoon we headed to the aquatics center for the swimming… we had lots of time so hired Lime bikes for us all which turned out to be a bit of a mistake. There were a few no cycle zones on the way which cut the power off on the bikes making them very hard to cycle, and actually finding a place to park at the center was very difficult. Super stressful and super expensive too. Would not recommend.
The swimming was amazing though, incredible atmosphere again and Adam Peaty only missed out on gold by a few hundredths and it turned out afterwards that he was suffering from Covid.
Monday morning we managed to meet up with friends who were also in Paris before getting the Eurostar back home.