Eiffel Tower – Paris, France

During our trip to Paris a MUST see was the Eiffel Tower! We also decided to check out the views from it as well. If you’ve been reading the blog then you know we visited the Eiffel Tower on our Day 2 in Paris.

We first made a stop at Trocadero to get the ‘best view in the city’ of the Eiffel Tower according to Rick Steves’ & other sources. I have to say it’s quite a great view!

This was on the top of Bea’s Bucket List so she was super excited to visit the Eiffel Tower!

If you can’t get over to Trocadero you can also get a good view of it from Champs de Mars as well, which is an easy walk behind the Eiffel Tower.

I love this one because Bub normally tries to stay as far away from the camera as possible but Mr. B caught him photo bombing here while he was taking a selfie…yes Mr. B took many selfies in Paris, LOL!

I started looking about a month out and the tickets were already sold out for the Eiffel Tower so we decided to walk up the stairs. We only waited for 10-15 minutes to buy out tickets and then start walking up. Adults were €5, kids 12-18 were €4, and kids under 12 were €3, so it was €20 for our family of 5 to walk up. We went mid April on a Thursday around 1 pm. My friend when the following week on a Saturday and waited over an hour to purchase tickets to walk up the stairs, so how long you wait will depend on the time/day of the week as well.

If our wanting to ride the elevator up and want to avoid waits I highly suggest booking as far out as possible via the official Eiffel Tower website (link above). This really wouldn’t work for us for several reasons…one I did not want to pick a certain day (of our 2 days in Paris) or time, I wanted more flexibility, I knew we would be physically able to walk so I decided that if wanted to go up we’d go that route. If you really want to ride up & pre-purchase tickets and they are sold out, make sure you check back daily, more days & times opened each day. I could have reserved one for our date as it got closer, but again chose not too. Which really worked out the best for us since Mr. B ended up being sick and I changed a few things around to accommodate that. Truthfully we didn’t ‘have’ to go up the Eiffel Tower, we waited to see what the lines were like and since they were small we went, but we would’ve been OK if we didn’t go up as well. We’d already seen city views from both Notre Dame & Arch de Triomphe, and they are all pretty much the same!

We walked up the 645 stairs to the 2nd floor, that was tough after just walking the Arch de Triomphe and Notre Dame the day before! We sure got our workout!

View from 1st floor towards Sacré-Coeur

View from 1st floor down the Seine River

View from the 2nd floor towards Trocadero.

I think the first floor has the best views of all the other monuments and places to visit. We stopped and took some pictures here and caught our breath before hiking it to the 2nd floor.

Bea was NOT happy about going up because she’s afraid of heights but I knew she’d regret it if she didn’t do it. After we got to the 2nd floor and were getting ready to come down I think she finally realized that she got so do something that many people dream of doing. We took the elevator down, but you can walk down if you’d like. We waited for about 10 minutes to ride the elevator down.

After we got down to the bottom we walked through Champ de Mars on our way to the Army Museum.

Know Before You Go:

Where: Eiffel Tower – Paris, France

How To Get There: Approx 4 hour drive from Spangdahlem.
From Disney Paris area its about 1.5 hours via bus/shuttle & RER/subway, subway stop is Champ de Mars / Tour Eiffel
Hop on Hop off bus & Batobus drops off near here.

What: Walk or ride up to the 1st, 2nd, or Top floor of the Eiffel Tower.

Cost: Adults were €5, kids 12-18 were €4, and kids under 12 were €3, you do need to show the kids passports to get the reduced rate for them.

Where to find info: Online, above links
Rick Steves’ Paris 2014

Have to visited the Eiffel Tower? What did you think?