Vive le Velib!

Andrew and I took advantage today of a marvelous, marvelous service of the City of Paris, called Velib.  This is a system of several hundred stations, located throughout Paris, where you can pick up a bicycle, ride it to a destination, and leave it at another Velib station.  The cost is amazingly low -- only one euro per day.  The only catch is that you must return the bike to another station within 30 minutes, else you are charged an additional one euro per half hour.  So long as you return a bike to a station, you can take another bike from that same station and start up a new 30 minutes.  All the stations are electronically linked, so you can see online how many bikes are available at any station in real time.  Quite groovy.

The bikes themselves are nothing to shake a stick at, bike-wise.  They are big and heavy and sturdy, and have only 3 gears, which frequently do not all work.  But the system is great, as it allows you to bike somewhere and then return your bike and not have to worry about having it stolen.  Or, if you bike across town and decide you don't want to bike back, you can just leave the bike and take the Metro.  All this for just one euro per day.  The other catch for tourists is that you need a bank card with an account in euros in order to get a daily ticket, otherwise you actually have to go to a manned station, plunk down $150, and then get your money refunded at the end of the day.

So Andrew and I biked from the Porte d'Orleans, north up the Rue de la Tombe Issoire (there must be a story there, I'll find it when I have more time), which turns into Rue St. Jacque, and eventually ends up in the St. Germain de Pres area.  There were found another station, returned our bikes, walked around a little, had a small snack, then got bikes again and headed across the Seine to the Ile de la Cite.  Andrew thought it would be cool to bike around Notre Dame, so we did that (it was cool), then we wanted to head west and travel along the Seine.  Unfortunately for us, right now in Paris the President Nicolas Sarkozy is hosting a Mediterranean Summit that includes the Presidents of Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon, and the Prime Ministers of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and many of the buildings were located close to where we needed to cycle through.  The result was that there were huge numbers of policy, gendarme, soldiers, and barricades, and we were precluded from going where we wanted to go, and had to pretty much head straight west on the south side of the Seine through dense traffic.  As a result, we blew our 30 minute limit (we almost went more than an hour) before we finally found a station to put our bikes into.  By this time we were at the Ecole Militaire down the Champs de Mars from the Eiffel Tower.  We walked a bit, found a Tabac, and bought drinks.  Sitting there, this was the scene:

 

And here's Andrew, looking happy.

By this time, we had biked a good ways and were tired, so we decided to take the Metro back.  On our way to the stop, we were treated to this scene, totally by accident. I never remember the name of this church, but it is the place where Napolean (No. 1) lies.

After that, waiting for the Metro, then home.

Since the Velib tickets are still good, Suzie and I plan to go out for a ride this evening.  What a life.