A long day starting with a ride on the Hop On - Hop Off bus to get a birdseye view of Paris sites and streets. It is a great way to see the city without a lot of walking, but a bit of a challenge for picture taking.
It is famous for architecture and is the setting for Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera.
We went to lunch at a sidewalk cafe which was very nice, but a bit hurried as Mom and I needed to be at the Eiffel Tower at a specific time.
Constructed from 1887 to 1889 as the entrance to the 1889 World's Fair. The tower is 1,063 feet tall, about the same height as an 81-storey building, and the tallest structure in Paris. During its construction, the Eiffel Tower surpassed the Washington Monument to become the tallest man-made structure in the world, a title it held for 41 years until the Chrysler Building in New York City was finished in 1930.
The wrought iron of the Eiffel Tower weighs 7,300 tons, and the addition of lifts, shops, and antennae have brought the total weight to approximately 10,100 tons.
Depending on the ambient temperature, the top of the tower may shift away from the sun by up to 7 inches due to thermal expansion of the metal on the side facing the sun.
You can see the Sacre-Coeur - Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris in the distance.
Palais de Chaillot - huge buildings housing a number of museums -
From here more lines to get down - longer than the line to get up to the top.
This is the East leg which rests on concrete slabs, which are 20 feet thick. Each of these slabs supported a block of limestone with an inclined top to bear a supporting shoe for the ironwork.
Each shoe was anchored to the stonework by a pair of bolts 4 inches in diameter and 25 feet long.
