Oui, Oui Paris

We have arrived in the City of Lights. Everyone is exhausted but ready to see the sights. First stop: Tour Eiffel (aka the Eiffel Tower).  We have already seen an IKEA and our hotel is connected to a mall (also not planned) but we are on the hunt for a raspberry beret.

So after Samone confirms that the McClouds are in the Penthouse suite (9th floor) versus their humble accommodations on the 2nd floor, we are off to figure out the French Metro system all on our own.  Never mind the fact that a large group of friends left the hotel just minutes before us - we lost them!  But we had two Chicago subway vets in our group so it was only a matter of 1) Figuring out where we were at any given point in our journey to the train station 2) Decoding the English version of the instructions on the ticket machine 3) Relinquishing the stand off with the automated device that refused to accept all of 6 credit cards attempted to be used by the McClouds, Porchias, and Davis group.  After many failed attempts to locate a "live" customer service representative, we ended up at a different set of machines and Stacy struck gold!  He bought up 20 tickets and we were finally on our way.  

This machine looks so innocent - all happy color green.  Don't be misled!

The locals were very kind to us (don't believe what "they" say about French being rude to Americans).  Besides the man who tried to get our credit card to work at the first machine we had war with, a nice lady noticed we were looking quite out of sorts at our connection stop.  She walked us back to the correct spot to catch our 2nd train - saving us the mishap of exiting and having to pay again to re-enter.  And when we got off that train, we saw this:

So it was time for a partial group selfie (aka us-ie)

So we decided to take a whole lot more pictures of the Eiffel Tower and us in front of it (trust me - you don't want to see all those pictures).  Then we went to dinner in a little cafe right on the famous Seine River and afterwards, convinced Stacy and Anthony that it was not worth it to pay $100 to drive a Lamborghini for 20 minutes (practical decision due in part to their wives reasoning against it given the heavy traffic in the area). Side note: Do you know how many raspberry berets we can get with $100.  Instead, we talked the guys into walking around a little bit longer in search of ice cream dessert in these freshly made waffle cones that smelled irresistable.  And then this happened:

So we took a bunch more pictures of the Eiffel Tower with it all lit up.  Very cool end to a very long day!