Travel Day 1 and Day 2
05 and 06 March 2026
This is how we left Yellowknife Thursday afternoon:
A roughly 1.75 hour flight to Calgary, roughly 3 hour layover, and roughly 8.5 hour overnight flight to Paris later, and we arrived Friday afternoon to practically balmy weather in comparison. There’s supposed to be comparative photos on our arrival to the above, but I was tired enough to forget to do it…
The flights were uneventful, and WestJet service was very good, but our seats were not comfortable enough for a red-eye flight of this length, despite purchasing econoflex with extended comfort. Especially with at least one unhappy 18-month-old sharing the cabin (poor thing). I think we’re going to have to splurge next time on the Premium seats on the outgoing leg, because honestly it’s taking way longer for us to physically recover than it used to. It’s a non-issue going home because we’re flying during the day on that leg, so we don’t need to sleep on the way.
We had a very smooth passage through customs at Charles de Gaulle, aside from a brief hiccup with the passport scanner giving Dan some grief. But he wasn’t the only one having that problem, and staff was there to sort it quickly. Our luggage arrived promptly (whaaaatt?) and we found a legit taxi exactly where the signs said we would. The driver was really friendly and chatty, but kept showing us on his phone while he was driving where to find places to see. I still don’t know how he didn’t crash the car in the process. But he got us to our hotel in one piece for 80€ — which his fellow drivers thought was too cheap, but I feel like it was a lot.
After checking into Hotel Le Relais Montmartre, we took the teeny-tiny elevator separately to our fifth floor room.
To our incredibly spacious fifth floor room with a reasonably spacious bathroom.
To say the least, we are very pleased with this hotel!
Once we got settled and had a very short nap, we endeavoured to push through the jet lag and adjust to the local time zone by going for a walk up to the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre (Sacred Heart Church). My intention was to take the funicular up to the church. That didn’t happen. We didn’t realize until we were pretty much there that the directions we were given walked us all the way up. We were pacing ourselves anyway (because, you know, tired) and it brought us past some lovely places, like this restaurant with a windmill on its roof: Le Moulin de la Galette, which has been there since the 17th century.
And an artists market. Sorry, no pictures of the market. But it was very busy pretty much everywhere, especially the church. We were way too tired to stand in the line to go inside, so we just walked around the outside of the church before taking the funicular back down.
My hair was doing wonderfully weird things. I forgot how humid it is in Paris.
The funicular turned out just to be an expensive ride down the hill, one that was way too full of people to even get a view, let alone a picture of the view, out the window.
We made our way back to our hotel, stopping at La Boheme Montmartre for supper. I had sea bream fillet while Dan had burrata with tomatoes and a pasta (macaroni) and ham dish. I forced myself to stay awake until about 9:30 pm, and then we crashed until 8:00 am Saturday.
Bonne nuit et bonjour,
Adelle and Dan
Guigon Travels 