Paris: Tour Eiffel

Day 2 of my trip finished with a long walk from Montparnasse over to the Eiffel Tower...  Very long walk, but very nice.  We passed a couple of landmarks and otherwise interesting things on the way. First was le musée de l'Armée.

And then this store in particular was amusing ^o^

I do not think they had in mind the implications of the store name in English... ^o^

There wasn't anything really Sioux about the products I could see in their shop window...  It looked like a pretty average cute baby clothes store.

In any case, with such amusement, the Eiffel Tower was finally reached!  I stopped at the far end of le Champ de Mars to get a pretty picture.

And then continued on my way to go up the actual tower.  Needless to say, there were hordes of street vendors with little Eiffel Tower shaped trinkets hanging on giant keyring-like things, trying to sell them for super-cheap (compared to the souvenir stores with physical setups).  It was like an obstacle course, trying to circumvent them...

As it turns out, there's a choice to take the stairs, or take the elevator.  You can only go to the very top of the tower if you choose the elevator option, although that seemed iffy, because half the time while I was looking at the sign, it said the top was "full" and therefore closed off at the moment.  It also cost more than twice as much.  I felt like just the observation deck was sufficiently high to satisfy my Eiffel Tower experience.  Soooo many stairs... but I climbed a lot of stairs in Paris, for some reason (maybe because I stayed with someone who lived on the 3rd floor?).  In any case, it was actually quite a nice walk up the tower, and the view from the observation deck was already plenty amazing, I really didn't need to crowd with the tons of people going to the very top (I hate crowds...).  I managed to snag a photo from two sides of the tower (the two most interesting sides).

Le Champ de Mars:

Trocadero:

And this is what the tower looks like, looking up from the 2nd observation deck:

WHEE!!  It was pretty awesome ^_^

And then of course we had to climb the stairs down... XD