The Great European Adventure, Day 17: The Final Dayfeatured

I’ve been so busy over the past two weeks. I wish I could say I was jetsetting to some exotic place (…or any place), or that I was spending every waking moment enjoying this warm extended fall we’re experiencing in Chicago, but the truth is not nearly as glamorous: I was at work.

Between the craziness of Q4 and finding myself in the middle of a promotional cycle (cross your fingers for me!), I live, breathe and sleep data and spreadsheets, counting down the days until we set sail for Aruba in four weeks and six days.

By Friday morning, I’d decided to have a quiet weekend alone in my apartment. Just me, my Netflix and my blog, finally wrapping up the Paris portion of this trip journal. By Friday afternoon, word started buzzing around my office of the attack on Paris and by Friday evening, I just couldn’t bring myself to write – I stayed up until 4:30 in the morning watching CNN. I spent the rest of the weekend contemplating whether or not it would even be appropriate to write about touristing and shopping my way through Paris right now, but the best way I can think of to show my support and love is to share the magic of the city through my words and photos.

Paris, je t’aime.

So where we left off, I’d gone to bed dreaming of leather handbags. And when I woke up? I dove right into all of the last minute research I could find. What bag did I want? What should I expect to pay? What about VAT?

I knew we had to get to the Louis Vuitton store early. Everything I’d read told me as the day went on, there could be lines to get in and getting help from a salesperson could be difficult. The bags we were looking for could even sell out. So we went into this with a plan:

1. Know the bags we were interested in. Not only would this help us narrow down the field, but it would make our visit efficient. This was our last day in Paris, after all, and while I love LV, we had a lot to see and do before we left European soil.
2. Know the US prices.
3. Download a currency converter to ensure the converted price was still less than what we’d pay in the US.
4. Go early.

I’d read everything I could about prices and VAT refunds (I’ll share my own personal experience in another post) and we left our hotel for the nearest L’Open Tour stop. I wanted to walk – it was a beautiful morning – but since we had another day on our passes and the route that stops at the Champs-Élysées was only a couple blocks from our hotel, we decided to HOHO it over to the store. Nothing starts a high end shopping experience like a ride over on a hop on hop off bus, am I right?

I didn’t think it would take more than 15 or 20 minutes to get to the Champs-Élysées, but it took nearly an hour. Apparently you can buy tour tickets on the bus, and every time someone boards to buy a ticket, it’s the bus driver who processes it. This slows down the tour tremendously, but if you’re stuck standing in one place on a bus, you may as well be somewhere as lovely as Paris. And on a morning as gorgeous as this one, we didn’t mind so much. The delays gave us extra time to observe the street market taking place on the sidewalks below and better observe the places we’d passed by the day before.

By the time we reached the Champs-Élysées, we were starving, so we hopped off in search of a place to grab a quick bite before our shopping expedition.

We ended up at Brioche Dorée, a French chain (that, fun fact: has a location inside O’Hare – go figure) and grabbed a table al fresco while dined on cappuccinos and pastries.

We made quick order of our breakfast and headed down the street to our intended destination: the flagship Louis Vuitton store.

Thankfully, there was no line to get in when we arrived at 10:30 am, but we did have to stop to have our bags checked by security before we entered. The flagship Louis Vuitton store is really something special – a must visit, even if you aren’t in the market for a new bag. It’s not just a store, it’s almost like a museum of art. Stained glass windows cast the store in a colorful glow and handbags and haute couture line the walls for as far as the eye can see. Employees, dressed sharply in chic black and white, escort prospective customers around, serving them glasses of champagne as they try on bags to find the perfect fit.

Our first matter of business when we entered was to flag down a salesperson. The store gets really crowded really quickly and finding someone free to help show you around can be difficult. It took us a good five or ten minutes before we found someone available to help us. I had screenshots on my phone of every bag I was interested in and the woman helping us was great in not only locating the bags, but showing me other bags that she thought I’d like. Once I decided on a bag (the Delightful MM in Damier Azur canvas, if you were wondering) and began the process of checking out, Stephanie decided she needed to have a bag, too – purchasing the same Totally Monogram MM bag that I had bought at the Aruba LV store the year before.

I sipped on champagne while Stephanie was getting her paperwork filled out and wandered around the floors of the store before heading out. A line had formed outside by the time we left and we were glad we made this our first stop of the day.

We didn’t want to tour the streets of Paris with these large, heavy shopping bags and Mom and Stephanie were still anti-walking, so we grabbed a cab for the short ride back to the hotel. Cabs in Paris are easy to catch and would line up near all of the major sites. The cars were immaculately clean and the drivers were dressed in suits, and even though it was a taxi ride, it felt like we were being chauffeured. The cab driver didn’t speak English and couldn’t read the map on my phone, which made for an interesting ride back through Madeleine, where we ended up getting dropped off a few blocks away from our hotel at the Gare Saint Lazare train station.

The cab driver’s mistake in our end location ended up being a blessing, because it dropped us closer to the Monoprix that was near our hotel. Monoprix is Paris’ answer to Target – a grocery slash pharmacy slash department store.

Stephanie had sent me an article before we left about Monoprix – how it was a haven for French epicurean delights and a great place to pick up Parisian wares to bring home. We stopped in for bottled water but while we were roaming the aisles, we decided it would be fun to have a picnic at the Eiffel Tower, so we picked up some salads, cheeses and breads before strolling back to the hotel.

While we were back at the hotel, we decided to do a little packing so that we’d have more time to wander later. Well, to be more accurate, Mom and Stephanie decided to pack a little. You know me. If we aren’t within 12 hours of departure, I’m probably not anywhere near my suitcase. I scrolled through my Instagram feed until Mom and Stephanie were ready to leave. We packed up our makeshift picnic and headed off towards the nearest L’Open Tour stop.

If we thought the drive to the Champs-Élysées was bad, the drive to the Eiffel Tower was even worse. Between the mid-day rush of people crowding the tour buses and traffic from events near the tower, it took over an hour to navigate from Madeleine to the 7th Arr.

The Eiffel Tower was packed with hefty lines to go up, but the lawn wasn’t nearly as crowded. We laid out a blanket, unpacked our food and just took it all in. It’s hard to describe the sky on a good day in Paris – the most wonderful shade of cerulean blue with the fluffiest white clouds. I could have laid on my back, watching the clouds chase each other and snacking on strawberries, for hours.

The crepe we’d shared the day before was so good that we wanted one more before we left, and we had our fair share of crepe stands to choose from – there are at least a half a dozen in the immediate vicinity of the tower – but the closer to the tower you are, the higher the price and the worse the service, in our experience.

Once we’d tossed the remnants of our picnic and finished our crepe, we headed back to the nearest HOHO stop and hopped on the first bus that we could get on.

By this point, we’d basically done everything we’d wanted to do in Paris: we’d shopped, we’d dined, we’d roamed and we’d seen most of the major sites. It was too late in the day to even attempt to get into the Louvre and we figured it was probably too much effort to head up to Sacre Coeur, too, but we weren’t ready to go back to the hotel. So we did what we naturally gravitate to – we wandered. We browsed the delicacies at Fauchon. We perused the goods at (another) Monoprix. We turned down streets we hadn’t been through yet just to see what we could find.

And since I couldn’t leave Europe without at least ONE more good cappuccino, we stopped at a small café, Patisserie Viennoiserie, that we found while wandering down one of those streets for just one more.

When we’d lost track of time and found dinnertime approaching, we stopped at the nearest café (Les 3 Quartiers). The food was decent, the service was great and we settled in at a table outside to people watch with our last meal. Dining truly is a spectator sport in Paris, and there was no more appropriate way to spend our last evening in the city.

It was getting late when we finished dinner (nearing 9:00 pm – still wasn’t used to these late dusks!), but I wasn’t ready to go back to the hotel and pack quite yet, so we split up. Mom and Stephanie went back to pack and I just…wandered…taking in as many storefronts, building facades and brightly colored doors as I could find.

Oh, and I made one last stop at Monoprix to stock up on French skincare, cappuccino mix, chocolates and whatever else I could fit in my suitcase.

Mom texted me that I couldn’t avoid packing forever and she was right, so I slowly trudged back to the hotel.

Our 9:30 am flight would really be 2:30 am at home, which isn’t an unheard of bed time for me, so I tried to stay up as late as I could so I could up my chances of sleeping on the flight home. There was no room for jet lag here – I had to be back at work the next day! So I packed (and re-packed). I took a long bubble bath. I checked the turbulence forecast and our flight path and I went through all of my pictures, not truly able to believe that our nearly three week adventure had come to an end. And when I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, I gave in to sleep.