Thursday August 7, 2025, 12:30am Colorado time, 8:30am Paris. We had an epic day yesterday. We started off with a private tour of Notre Dame. Once inside though, there were thousands of people. Still, an amazing thing to see. On the way back to our hotel, we stopped for breakfast and then texted Mousse, our driver. He met us at the hotel with our stretch BMW and we then drove around the city stopping at different landmarks and unknown places only locals know about. Of course, we hit the Eiffel Tower and did a bit of shopping. The benefit of having a driver, especially ours, who is our new best friend, is he got us into everything. One stop was Goyard, the exclusive French bag and luggage maker. There was a line an hour long waiting to get in, but with a quick conversation between Mousse and the doorman, we were waived right in pass the 40 or so people waiting in line.
We spent 3 hours touring the city and hitting all the best of the best places that mostly only locals know about. One was this cheese shop that was out of the way and nondescript, but fantastic. Mousse said it’s the best in Paris. We bought $40 euro worth of cheese that would have cost $250 in the U.S. The cheese man even vacuum packed it for us and it’s in Lori’s carry on right now.
Around 4 we made it back to our boutique hotel that treated us like royalty. We dropped off some things and headed out to shop for the boys. We found a great shirt shop, reasonably priced and bought them each a couple shirts. We found Lori a really cool scarf and spent the next few hours walking around.
You can easily spot tourists in Paris. We though looked like locals. There are lots of people in town and in places like Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, you can see it. There’s no shortage of money here as like I said, the line at Goyard was an hour long to get to see an advisor. I’ll bet the average purchase was $5000! Lori gets buyer’s remorse before she even buys anything these days. She never asks for anything, but I can tell when she likes something. Its usually a challenge though as I almost have to force her to buy things. Years ago she was a better buyer but always frugal. She found a great bag and later we joked that this will probably be the last purse she ever buys. She’s done well though as all her Louis Vuitton’s have tripled in price! If she ever has to, she can sell them easily for a nice sum.
We had dinner in the hotel and then headed upstairs to purge our bags with things we didn’t need, to be able to pack all of our purchases. We made it to the airport in record time, (about 30 minutes) and Mousse came in and showed us where to get our VAT tax refund, which was like $700 Euros, and then headed to the gate. We’re in the lounge right now waiting for our 10:30am flight to Frankfurt, where we’ll connect to a nonstop to Denver. We’ll arrive around 3:30 and should, knock on wood, sail through customs as we both have Global Entry, meaning we’ve been prescreened for entry to the Country.
It’ s been a great trip and went pretty fast. We saw and did a lot of things but it’s always great to get home. We did pretty well on spending too as I had everything lined up ahead of time. We were on 8 planes in 9 days and in four different hotels, all fantastic. Pics to come tomorrow, have a great Thursday and we’ll post tomorrow. GB