Due to the weather, we extended our stay in Paris for an extra night instead of traveling to another city such as Rouen or Amiens. So we had one day in a rainy Paris before continuing to Beauvais. We stayed close to the Parc de la Villette, the third-largest park in Paris. The park is home to the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, the biggest science museum in Europe, and many more activities, at least during the summer.
Exploring La Villette
We started the morning with a short walk to the Parc de la Villette. It was far from crowded at this time of the year, especially with the rain just waiting for the right moment to pour down. Walking along the park’s canals gave the impression that this could be a beautiful place during the summer months. Now it was mostly grey and quite boring. In other words, there was not much going on here.
That is why we started to walk towards the park’s main attraction the large science museum, the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie. The museum was supposed to have a kids’ section known as La Cité des Enfants and this was where we were planning to go. Well, at least me and Little A. Before that we enjoyed a short lunch, to ensure we had the required energy.
La Cité des Enfants
We had checked online about the ticket availability before our lunch stop. It had looked fine with tickets available for all entry times in the afternoon. So once we went inside we were quite surprised to be told that the tickets were sold out for the rest of the day. It seems like Paris is one of those cities where you can not be both a tourist and on vacation, everything needs to be pre-booked and you need to follow a schedule.
We gave up and started to walk back towards the hotel. But I kept trying to get their very slow-loading website to load to check if it still stated that there were tickets available. To my surprise, it was still possible to buy the tickets with an entry time of 15 minutes later. So I hurried to buy two tickets and we almost ran back to the entrance of the science museum. Of course, the museum had an airport-style security check that we had to go through first. Little A and I were just in time for the entry into La Cité des Enfants.
La Cité des Enfants is a place where kids can play with many interactive experiments. It was quite similar to a place in Södertälje that I visited as a kid. But I was surprised that Tom Tits in Södertälje was a lot bigger than La Cité des Enfants. I thought that Paris would have something more advanced for the kids. Instead, this was a small place with quite mediocre experiments. Sadly, there were kids (and parents), who didn’t respect that others were waiting in line. Instead, they were pushing themselves to the attractions, which happened several times. Unfortunately, a lot of the experiments were also broken.
Well, I might have expected more, but Little A was more than happy to play around here. We ran between the different rooms and she soon found a few favorite attractions that we alternated between.
Even More Rain
The fun at La Cité des Enfants did eventually come to an end. We were leaving and soon met up with Susann, who had spent the time at a café at the museum. But the weather didn’t want us to leave just yet. The rain was pouring down as we got to the exit of Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie. We had to wait over 10 minutes before it got better and we could start our walk back to the hotel.
Our last evening in Paris was spent relaxing for a while in our hotel room before going out for dinner. We were still quite tired from all the walking during the earlier days and enjoyed a slower day. After all, we were going to explore Beauvais the following day.
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