A day with kids around Gare Austerlitz in Paris

I do wonder how how many people find themselves in this same situation. A train leaving Austerlitz in the evening bound for the magical South. What’s to do with the day? For us, we had the golden tickets – couchettes on the night train to the border at Latour de Carol in the Pyrenees. Sleeper trains are surely the most regal of transports. Our challenge was to keep the kids entertained and fed for a good eight hours. This is what worked for us.

Store the bags

There is a left luggage at the station just by platform 1. It opens 0700hrs shuts at 2300hrs. Perfect for us as our train was due to depart ~2140hrs. We needed one of the biggest lockers for all our main packs which ended up at a very reasonable ~9EUR. This left us just with adventuring kit in hand and ready to go.

Explore the zoo in the garden

The main gates to the Jardin des Plantes is right opposite the corner of the station. This botanical garden is part of the natural history museum of France and within it is so much more than plants. In fact we didn’t bother many of the plants. And we also didn’t pay for most of the other things, including the many museums even the paleontological and geological ones (quelle horreur!).

Instead we made a beeline for the zoo (La Menagerie). This turned out to be an awesome choice (Rafe score 8/10). The first thing we saw were the red pandas for Dessa’s sanity as she loves those cute bears. Rafe then insisted we went on to see everything else, as he likes to complete everything including the reptiles and the tapirs.

Eat like a local

All of this exploring made all of us hungry especially Dessa who doesn’t really have big cheeks to store food in like the rest of us. Just north of the west-most corner of the park (up Rue Linne) we found bistro Les Arènes. We got lucky as this was their last day before the summer holidays. The kids both had steak hache et frites, Jim had steak tartare and Helen had the most enormous salad. Rafe noted that this was the same price, that we ate twice as much and better, when compared to the tourist trap we were in too close to the Eiffel Tower the day before.

Play in a most historic park

It is well known that the best thing to do with a full tummy is to go to the play park. And who are we to go against tradition. Barely 100 metres west of the bistro (along Rue Arenes) we discovered why everything is called “Arenes”. The play park hit one of Rafe’s two pre-requisites for a play park (a climbing wall or boulder – the other being monkey bars). It also had a drinking water fountain to fill our bottles which is something we found a lot around Paris – bon! It was entirely down to fortune that we bimbled up the steps and found ourselves gazing upon a roman amphitheatre – the Arènes de Lutèce. Some of the most important roman remains in all of Paris. Wikipedia tells us they were lost and only rediscovered when someone was building a tram station, and then preserved with the help of Victor Hugo. For us it meant a lazy time watching people play boule.

Watch Paris being Paris

It was a now an early Friday evening. Wandering along the south bank of the Seine we saw several groups dancing anything from samba to le hip hop, people playing bongos and plenty simply lounging about. We couldn’t have asked for a more stereotypically Parisian scene. Oh, and there’s another playpark along there, also scoring 1/2 in the Rafe-dex this time on account of its monkey bars.

Leave on a night train to…

Latour de Carol. Time for bed said zebedee. You’ve had enough magic for one day.