Last trip to Paris...for a while at least :(

I couldn't leave Europe without one last trip to visit Rick in Paris, so a couple of days before we flew out I jumped on the Eurostar to spend the weekend there. Having seen the sights in Paris before, we decided instead to do something I'd always wanted to do but never had the chance - Asterix and Obelix Park. Like Disneyland, but with the characters from the aforementioned comic books instead of Mickey Mouse, this theme park on the outskirts of Paris retains a lot of the humour from the book, even if we were just guessing at what a lot of it meant (not a lot was written in English).

Asterix and Obelix

To be fair, a lot of the humour didn't really need English to be understood

They weren't really kiddy rollercoasters, either!

After the theme park and dinner we rented some Velib (hire-by-the-hour bikes) and rode home through Paris - I'd highly recommend it, you cover a lot more ground than by foot, but see a lot more of the city than in a car or public transport. And despite what everyone says about drivers in Paris, they certainly know how to drive around cyclists so I don't think it was just the couple of glasses of wine that were making me feel perfectly safe...

Paris by night

Sunday we headed out with some of Rick's friends to St Germain en Laye, where Rick had been based for the first half of his time in Paris. The Chateau out there was actually the home of King James in exile during the English 'Glorious Revolution' and still boasts immaculate grounds - so we grabbed some food from the market and had a picnic by the Chateau. It was an impressive place and yet when we went in we were the only tourists, which to me sums up Paris - more good stuff to see than people to see it!

The Chateau at St Germain en Laye