France 2024

Today we did some traveling outside of Paris. Originally we were thinking of visiting the Palace of Versailles , but after reading reviews it seemed like it gets uncomfortably crowded. Instead we decided to visit the Château de Fontainebleau  which sounded just as nice, but less crowded. We took the Metro to the Gare de Lyon  where we transferred to the RER-R to Fontainebleau and then took the #1 bus to the Château. It took a little over an hour to get there and despite not being in Paris, was still included in our transit pass. The RER train was very nice. It wasn't quite as nice as the TGV we took to Nice, but nicer than the starndard Metro trains. Unfortunately I didn't know that it also has power at the seats or I would have brought with a charger to charge our phones during the trip.

The Chateau was huge and the part open to the public was only about half of the Château. Since there was a large group of students in front of us, we decided to skip the first section on Napoleon and come back to it later. When we finally arrived at the end of the tour, we couldn't figure out how to get back to the first section that we had missed. There were two young men at the exit, but one only spoke French and the other who spoke English was new and didn't know how to help us. The one who spoke French tried explaining it to the other, but I think something was lost in translation. After wandering around the exit and gift shop a bit we went back to the two young men and the one who only spoke French spoke something into his radio and then told me to go up the stairs and pointed in the direction. When we got to the top of the stairs there was someone waiting for us at a door that had previously been closed and they led us down a hallway right to the entrance of the section we wanted.

After visiting the Château we strolled around Fontainebleau for a bit looking for somewhere we wanted to eat. We ended up at Le Tendance where Alexandra had French onion soup and I had one of the best burgers.

Upon returning to Paris we headed toward the Pompidou Center, first stopping at the very interesting and unusual Stravinsky Fountain.

Due to construction around the Pompidou Center for the upcoming Olympics, it took us a bit to find the entrance. Unfortunately once we got in it's a little confusing exactly where you're supposed to go. We ended up taking the escalators all the way up to the fifth floor, unfortunately the entrance is on the fourth floor and we had walked over to the elevators, which don't stop on the fourth floor, so we ended up taking the elevators back down to the first floor, only to take them back up to the fifth and then an escalator down to the fourth floor. Clearly they need better signage on where to go. With the Pompidou center being a museum of modern art and neither of us being fans of modern art, we did not stay long.

After leaving the Pompidou Center we walked up to the musée des Arts et Métiers . This museum was very surprising in many ways and definitely one of the highlights of the trip for me. The museum is housed inside an old church and is much larger than I expected. The museum has an incredible collection of scientific equipment from simple weights, barometers, and thermometers, all the way to modern computers including a CRAY 2 supercomputer. Nearly every device you can thing of including the design of cranes used to build churches in ancient times was included. I had taken a large number of photos but unfortunately those were lost along with the phone.

Our next stop was to something more to Alexandra's liking, the Musée du Chocolat . This museum covered the history of chocolate from its start in South America, to the adoption by Europe and the United States. Unfortunately we had arrived not far from closing time, but the person at the ticket counter thought we still had enough time to make it through. We ended up seeing everything with a few minutes to spare.

For dinner we ended up at Delaville just across the street from the museum.

After dinner we headed to the Muse d'Orsay since it's open late on Thursday nights and we thought rather than rush to see it during the day we'd take the opportunity to see it in the evening. To get there from the restaurant we had to take two different trains. Unfortunately when we got to the stop for d'Orsay I felt down for my phone and realized my phone was gone. The trains were very crowded and apparently a pickpocket had unclipped it from my belt clip without me noticing. I was standing among a bunch of well dressed business people so I had let my guard down a bit. While I had my phone set to automatically back up my photos, I had it set to only do that while connected to WiFi and since I hadn't connected during the day, none of my photos from this day were backed up.

After all of the evenings craziness, trying to find a police station to see if they help get back my phone, only to find they couldn't do anything without the IMEI number, which I didn't have handy at the time, going back to the hotel to get the IMEI number and being directed to a police station that is not for the public and learning the one that was had already closed for the day, we decided to wind down with a peaceful stroll along the Siene where we happened to catch a nice sunset.

• Make sure you have the Find My Phone feature enabled. This is offered by Apple, Samsung, and Google.
• Make sure your phone is always locked requiring a password or fingerprint to unlock it.
• Any account that supports 2FA (two-factor authentication) should have it enabled, especially for financial accounts.
• Ensure automatic backups are enabled, especially for photos.
• For Android phones, Google and Samsung backups only backup Android settings. Any data stored locally by various apps will not be backed up. If this data is important to you, make sure you have some way of backing it up.
• Have your IMEI written down somewhere that you can easily find as you'll need it to file a police report, but secured so no one else can find it.
• Get a smart tag and carry it with you. I had two that I had used to track luggage, but didn't have either with me when my phone was taken. If I had, I could have double clicked the smart tag and if my phone was still within range it would have started ringing.