Summer 2026 Graduation Celebration: Edinburgh, London, Disneyland Paris, Paris - Day 12 Paris

We were finally able to sleep in a bit and get a good night’s sleep. Roger and Emmaline got a little extra because I went ahead with Dru to take her bags to a luggage locker near Notre Dame before our day’s activities. That way she wouldn’t have to go all the way back to the AirBnB (which was slightly west of the city) before taking her train which would depart from a station slightly east of the city. 

After securing the luggage, we met up with Emmaline and Roger for our 10 AM boat tour of the Canal Saint Martin and the Seine. This two hour took us through some of the older canals in the city, parts of them in underground tunnels, through several locks southward until we reached the level of the Seine, then we traveled west for awhile before turning back east and landing near Notre Dame. We all really enjoyed the tour, learning about the landmarks along the way. If you watched the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics you may have seen some of the boats that transported some of the athletes and this was one such boat.

We completed the tour at noon and took a quick trip to visit the Pont des Arts bridge. Emmaline was on a mission to visit sites from a series of episodes of Heartstopper in which they visit Paris and this bridge was one such site. Then we moved on to lunch where I had made a reservation (but really didn’t need to) for a nearby French restaurant. We enjoyed our food and moved along to Notre Dame where we had reserved a timed entry for 1:45 PM the day before. It was really exciting to be in the cathedral after the restoration and it is stunning inside. 

After Notre Dame, we set off to find some dessert and we went to Odette, which is a creme puff shop Roger had heard of. We got six different creme puffs to go, made a quick stop in a coffee shop for some coffees to go and enjoyed them in a nearby park. At this point, it was time for Dru to leave to catch her train home so we parted ways. I’m so glad she was able to join up! 

I had different plans for this day, but a few days before the trip Dru realized she needed to get back sooner than anticipated so we were able to reschedule one activity and I moved several others around to sort things out so she could leave earlier. So that meant that I swapped another afternoon’s activities to this day to accommodate. Unfortunately I didn’t check the hours of the Musée de Cluny and when I did so I found it was closed on Mondays. I had really wanted to see the unicorn tapestries. That’s okay, I had an alternate backup activity for the area of town we were in. I intentionally over planned with the idea that we may need to cut things or make changes depending on how we were feeling and I figured it would be better to have something ready to go versus having to stand around and figure out what to do. 

And so it was that we found ourselves en route to the Pantheon. Obviously not the one in Rome, but the Parisian one, which I had thought was a replica but they don’t look the same. On our way there, we stopped by Église Saint-Étienne-du-Mont which houses the shrine of Saint Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, having saved the city from Attilla the Hun in 451. It's a beautiful church and much less busy than some others we had visited on the trip. 

We moved on to check out the Pantheon and the first thing we saw was Foucault's pendulum, apparently one of the original concepts of the pendulum for keeping time. And in the lower level there is a crypt housing many notable tombs. There are little terminals interspersed around the crypt so you could look up various people interred there. So we visited Voltaire, Pierre and Marie Curie, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Alexandre Dumas, Louis Braille, and Josephine Baker. 

After this, we walked to the nearby Jardin du Luxembourg which was on Emmaline’s list. It’s a really beautiful park and we made a visit to the Medici Fountain there and saw the Luxembourg Palace (official seat of the French senate). We moved on, making a quick stop off at the former site of the Texas Embassy. France was one of the first countries to recognize Texas as a country and set up an embassy. It’s a hotel now, but there’s a plaque. 

We returned to our apartment to relax for a few minutes before heading back out to dinner. We walked to a little French place close by. They weren’t serving dinner until 7 PM but we didn’t want to figure anything else out so we just had some snacks and drinks while we waited for it to roll over to 7 PM. We had a nice dinner there and then went back to our apartment and relaxed for the rest of the evening.