We returned to Paris this summer to visit our friend Maisie and her daughter Lucy. It’s been more than two years since our last visit, during my sabbatical. Catching up with these two was the primary reason for the visit. Lucy is a few months younger than László, and Danielle and Maisie are both writers, so it’s a good family match. Mostly, we spent as much time as we could with them and stayed in the “nest” apartment, owned by Maisie and her parents.
Bike Paris
We remembered Paris having a good biking scene and infrastructure network in 2023 and it’s one thing to observe bike infrastructure, but we decided this time to experience it. Our cargo bike is an essential component of day-to-day at home, so it was hard to imagine life without one for a week. A company called Welgo set us up with an Urban Arrow and a Yuba long tail so we could bike with the kids in tow.
Verdict: Paris is an incredible city to bike in. The city’s famed boulevards are veritable bike highways. One way, narrow side streets almost always have a contraflow bike lane for bikes. This allows them to effectively interconnect the higher capacity boulevards. All of this traffic calming amounts to a grid of roadways that accommodate all users, including cars, with a reasonable balance between speed and safety.
Despite the fact that there’s zero parking and one lane of automobile traffic connecting three of Paris’s most iconic landmarks, none of them had any trouble packing in the customers. Seems like increased mobility is good for business after all.
That’s all a long way to say: We always found a safe route by bike and there was never a moment where we were abruptly forced to take the lane alongside 35 miles per hour traffic. The cargo bike was a ton of fun and let us get around much more quickly, and it was nice to drive an Arrow around without having to buy one. I wouldn’t rule out the bakfiets style entirely, but this one wasn’t for me.
Musée des Arts Forains
Danielle described this to a friend as France’s House on the Rock and that’s about as perfect of a tag as anybody can make. The Musée des Arts Forains is essentially Jean Paul Favand’s collection of art from 19th and early 20th Century funfairs around France restored and brought back to life in Bercy, the center of Parisian fairgrounds. And what a collection it is: Artifacts as small as fountain pen tips in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, larger than life statues of Josephine Baker, fully functional mechanical carnival games, several entire carousels on display, playable, and rideable.
Our tour was about 45 longer than advertised but extremely fun. We got to ride the only working bicycle carousel in the world. It’s almost 130 years old and “took 20,000 hours of restoration” from “18 different trades” to get it working when the museum acquired it. It was a workout.
22 Velocipeds propel the entire thing forward. They lean inward, so I had to work really hard to keep from falling off while pedaling. Maybe it’s easier for a shorter person? They’re fixed gear so they keep spinning even if your legs can’t keep up and you lose the pedals. Supposedly, firefighters would come down to the funfair after their shifts to ride these and get them going almost 25 miles per hour. The highest recorded top speed was nearly 40! They must have been unbelievably sweaty.
Balloon Museum redux
Two years later, the Balloon Museum has two touring exhibits. This year, they’ve taken up residence in the Grand Palais, erstwhile venue of Olympic fencing, for their Euphoria exhibit. It’s an exceptional facility for a museum defined by the human relation the inflatables, and this year’s exhibits made good use of the space. One exhibit was a greenhouse filled with balloons. Another was a round of swings with balloons suspended from cables dancing from the ceiling down toward a large circular table in the center. You can ride the swings, or lie down on the table. There were some familiar items, too, like the Ginjos and Hyperstudio brought another pool-sized ball pit experience to this museum, and all of the four museums around the world.
The Balloon Museum’s Euphoria is in Paris until August, and the other exhibits are in:
- Pop Air: Singapore
- Let’s Fly: Austin, TX
- Emotion Air: San Francisco
Good friends make a good vacation
Other than the big attractions, we also just had some fun hanging out with our friends in the big city. Here’s a sentence nobody has ever written before: Paris is fabulous. Duh. We had a blast hanging with our friends Maisie and Lucy. They kindly let László stay the night so we could have a night out on our own. All in all, it was a blast and we’re grateful to have good friends across the Atlantic we can’t wait to see them again.
