Bus Tour (day 2)

As I said yesterday my bus ticket was good for three days so I spent today on the buses again. The day was sunny and beautiful the with hardly a cloud in the sky. This time I mostly traveled the yellow and blue lines and got to see more of the city.  I enjoyed riding on the open topped buses with the wind in my hair and the sun on my back.

At about 4:30 I decided to head back home knowing that the buses would take awhile to get around. So I switched from the Blue line to the Green line that would travel around to all the major monuments before dropping me at the Yellow line that would take me to the apartment (as you can see this route could take awhile). The Green line is an excellent ride around to the Louvre, Notre Dame, Musee D'Orsay, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, and more. It usually takes an hour to an hour and a half to get all the way around, and there is a section where I could have hopped off at stop 9 and walked a block to stop 18 cutting out most of the route but it was a lovely day and I had nothing else to do so I rode it all the way around. Now what I didn't realize was that there was some sort of tennis match going on under the Eiffel Tower (2014 French Open it turns out).

There were police out in force and they had roads blocked off and traffic backed up for miles. During this route the bus travels down the Champs-Elysees Avenue which provides a great view of the Arc de Triomphe and as you ride down it plays Champs Elysees by Joe Dassin on repeat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9V-zUlrhEE&feature=kp), not usually a big deal as the ride only takes 10mins or so but with the traffic backed up it took near 30mins with that song on repeat the whole time and I had it stuck in my head for the next 2 hours. All this extra time with traffic meant I didn't get to my stop for the yellow line till 6:30 or so. Now I had read the schedule and how it said that buses ran from 9:30am-7:50pm but in another section it says the last bus runs at 6:30, so I catch the last yellow bus and the driver informs everyone that it's going to go to Gare du Nord and stop. Not where I needed to go but closer then I was right then so I sucked it up and thought "I'll just walk from there". Well it did go to Gare du Nord but what the driver didn't say is that the bus would go strait there without going by any of the stops and then drop you off on a corner the bus usually never even goes to. So I had an interesting ride back and a bit of a long walk but I made it back to the apartment with little incident.