Another day in Paris, another iconic place to visit better send Ray out to get something for breakfast. I managed to get by with a bon jour and merci mixed in with my English.
Time stamped 10:31am. Showing also the minimal gap between table down and the cupboard, which was able to open with millimetres to spare.
Then we were on the street and I saw this guy prepping his old car for tourist trips
Within a short time he had a customer
Then we joined the queue and Jeantine went ahead to survey the possibilities and options. Meantime we shuffled along and got talking with an American woman (from Los Angeles I think) and her husband had taken their kids across the road to a Merry Go-Round to distract the children. The husband would occasionally wave to his wife in the queue to confirm he could see where we were up to.
Below, the American couple we were behind and chatting to, in line on the street, where the father with our encouragement took their 3 kids onto the carousel across the road. When we had got off the roadside and closer to the entry point the woman remonstrated with some queue jumpers who tried to get between us. These were people who would sneak across the snaking queue ostensibly to catch up with people they knew.
Jeantine was expressing doubts about whether we should stay in line, and opt for coming back first thing the next day. Then when she found we were chatting to this American family, she decided against that and just go with the slow flow.
We also got chatting to an Iranian man and his father and when they found out we were from Auckland, the younger mentioned he was a traffic engineer and had heard about Auckland's traffic woes. His father was most keen to show us a little video clip on his smart phone, of his son getting his engineering degree but it was too difficult to see and hear with the crowd around us to make out the detail of what was happening. We just had to acknowledge that the father had every right to be proud of his son's achievements.
When we eventually made entry to the area below the four supporting columns, we had a choice of East, West, North or South entry points. This involved more queuing but the shortest line was for walking up the stairs to level two - and then you could take the lift right to the top. Sadly for us, it was 3.5 hours to make it to the top.
We had plenty of time in line to observe that there were priority queues and obviously Tour Groups would get priorty. Our misfortune was to choose the West lift,and to be finally, ready and waiting at the head of the queue, for the doors to open and we got told it had broken down. After an attendant came up to lift door and then went back down the steps without saying anything, some Brits called out "Can you please tell what is going on?"
We were then escorted across to the East lift but this invoived running as a group but Barb wasn't capable of running so I was trying to be at a mid way point to keep our group in sight and also be visual on Barb.
This photo time stamped as 2:30 pm and the first photo of queue was at 12:16pm and the photo in the lift shows as 3:30pm. To think in 1963 on our 11th World Jamboree Trip to Greece and going through Paris I didn't feel compelled to go up the Eiffel Tower, but rather chose to give it a miss and just wait at the bottom until the others came back down. Perhaps I was concerned for my spending money I don't recall, however I was soon able to go to a Bank in Threadneedle Street in London and pick up small contribution to my costs from my Uncle Sandy Brown in New Zealand.
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