Oliver’s Travels #3

The next weekend, we caught a fast train from Valencia to Madrid, which is the capital of Spain. And it is the home of my favourite soccer team, Real Madrid. In Spain they call it Futbol, not soccer.
In Madrid, we went through the train station to find where our train would leave from, then we had to wait about five hours. After that we caught a hotel train where you have your own room, and we had four beds. We went to sleep at night time, and in the morning we woke up in France, on our way to Paris.
Then, when we got off at the train station, we caught a taxi to our hotel. Across the road from our hotel was the Louvre.
We left our bags at the hotel, and we walked to the Louvre, which is a famous art museum, and home of the Mona Lisa painting, which was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci, who was a very famous painter from 500 years ago. There were some glass pyramids in the courtyard outside. When you looked down through the pyramids you could see the inside of the Louvre.
That night we went for a stroll along the river, there were lots of bridges going across the water. Some of them had locks on them with people’s names on the locks. We could see the Eiffel Tower across the river, lit up with lots of lights.
We had dinner at this restaurant which had lots of pictures of dogs. It is called Au Chien qui Fume. Where I was sitting was in front of the only cat picture in the whole restaurant!
I had a HUUUUUUUGGGGGGE hamburger for dinner. The waiter was nice with kids and made me laugh a lot.
The next morning, we got up early, and we caught a bus tour of Paris. First stop was the Arc de Triomphe, and we drove all around Paris, and finished at the Eiffel Tower. We caught a lift to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Luckily, we didn’t have to wait long because we had speedy tickets, which meant we didn’t have to wait in the queue. It was lucky because one of the lifts was broken and there was a HUUUUUUUUGGGGGE long queue. On the way up we could see Paris through the windows in the lift. We got out at floor one, and looked around at Paris from the outside deck. It was hard to see very well, because there was so much mist everywhere. Then, we went up to level two in another lift, which was smaller, and then we walked up some stairs to the very top. At the top there was a room that showed lots of towers from all over the world, and their heights, and we found the Sky Tower in Auckland, and it was taller than the Eiffel Tower. And when we got out onto the deck we could see even more Paris!
Then we went down to the bottom and we had some lunch sitting on the wharf next to the River Seine.
While we had lunch, Daddy went to buy some tickets so we could go on a river cruise. We got off at Notre Dame Cathedral, then we went inside. We didn’t go right to the top, but there were lots of Gargoyles on the top.
Then we got back on the boat and we went around the river some more until we got back to the hotel.
Later that day, we went for a walk to Montmarte, but when we were going there, we had to stop because there were hundreds of motorbikes driving past, in our way. We couldn’t get across the road because there were so many. The noise was really loud. It was a protest, and bikes had been joining them from all over France. After about half an hour we could get across the road.
After that, we went back to the hotel.
Then we went to the train station to catch our train to go back to Barcelona over night.
When we reached Barcelona, we tried to find a train that went to the zoo. A man in the ticket office told us which train to catch, and we got on the train there. But, it was the wrong train, and we ended up going out of Barcelona. So we had to get off that train as soon as we could, and wait for ages until we could get on another train back to Barcelona. We didn’t have much time left then, so we had lunch and then we went to see some really groovy houses designed by the artist Gaudi, which are called Las Ramblas.
Finally, we got on the speedy train to go back home to Valencia. When we got back to Valencia, Ignacio, who is a friend that works with Daddy, picked us up in his car and drove us home.
To be continued……………