Paris, Day 1. The Eiffel Tower.

For my 21st birthday, I decided instead of a present I wanted to go to Disneyland Paris with my sister. After my parents surprisingly agreed for me to take my younger sister out of the country, we just grew more and more excited. A couple months before we were due to go, my best friend Sophie texted me to ask if her and her brother Daniel could gatecrash and come with us. It was the best idea Emma and I could think of and before you know it, off we went.

I'll skip through the whole fandango of travelling there with the boring security checks and baggage claim, so i'll just show you a picture of us on the plane with the strange man that was sat next to me.

Plane selfie!

Once we had checked in to our hotel, we decided to go on a little adventure to the Eiffel Tower considering our Park tickets were only valid for 2 out of our 3 days. This started with having a small dilemma at the train station; we had bought our tickets and knew what stop to get off at, but all of the signs were in French and we had no idea what side of the station to get on the train! After a lot of confusion and slow conversations with the French Information people, we managed to get on the right train, only the line terminated 1 stop before where we needed to get off.

A DOUBLE DECKER TRAIN PEOPLE

So it was back to stressing out. After leaving the tube station, we knew we were in the main city of Paris, but had absolutely no idea where. We figured that we were bound to see the tower from somewhere - it's huge! We were stood staring at a city map for what seemed like hours to try and navigate ourselves there. In the end I got a little fed up and flagged down a taxi (I was totally feeling like Blair or Serena when they go to Paris in Gossip Girl at that moment). 1 taxi ride later, and we were there.

Here we are!

Once we were there, the phones and cameras were out and millions of photos were taken. After seeing it in real life, i've realised that photographs really don't do it justice. It's so much bigger and so much more beautiful when you're really there. Especially when it's lit up at night! We had a little mooch around and bought a few souvenirs and some food, then decided it was time to get in line to go up the tower. The queue was horrendously long but eventually we got to the front.

So pretty!

Going up the lift made me nervous. I'm not brilliant with heights, yet I still always want to look down, and that was a bad idea. We went straight up to the second tier (unfortunately the top had closed by this point). The view was incredible. We saw the Arc de Triumph and Notre Dame and you can literally see for miles, I just couldn't stop looking out into the city.

The view from the first tier!

It was 11pm when we decided to leave and make our way back to the tube station. We got a taxi back and went down about 5 escalators into a completely deserted station. It looked apocalyptic. Exhausted from an extremely long day, we got on the train and began to relax knowing we would be back in our beds within 2 hours. That was when we realised that the last train stop was 3 stops before ours back in Disneyland. Time to panic again. When we got off at some station called 'Torcy', we saw that there were other passengers waiting for another train too. Knowing that we weren't completely alone and in the comfort that there was another British family on the platform, we sat and waited 20 minutes for the next train.

Eventually, the train came, and before long we were back in Disneyland and getting onto the shuttle bus straight back to the hotel. It was 2am when we were back in our rooms, and after such a long day travelling, we all crashed pretty much straight away.

That's the end of day one! Check here again tomorrow for day two.