But first, a stop in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

When I booked our trip way back in November of last year, I booked a direct Calgary, Alberta to Paris, France flight with WestJet on their 787 Dreamliner.

In May of this year, WestJet cancelled our outbound flight and offered us a short 2 hour stopover in Halifax if we flew on the 737 Max-8. We would be leaving Calgary earlier in the day and arriving in Paris before lunch time instead of mid afternoon like originally planned. As much as I wanted to avoid flying on a 737 these days, I really didn’t want to fly another day and I figured Halifax would be a lot easier to navigate than if we had to land in Toronto so I agreed to the change.

It was a full flight out of Calgary under blueish skies on Saturday, September 10th at 1:20 pm. There was a lot of forest fire smoke in the air so even at altitude, the sky wasn’t it’s usual shades of blue.

It was dark when we got to Halifax at 9:00 pm local time and were glad to survive the really hard landing we had. With only a 2 hour layover I didn’t try to get any photos of anything.

11:00 pm had us back in the air winging east towards the Atlantic Ocean on our way to Europe.

We tried, and failed to get any real sleep on the flight. Between the air traffic and fog, we were almost an hour later than our scheduled 10 am local time arrival on Sunday, September 11th.

Getting through Customs and getting our luggage took over an hour ( I think the 3 mile walk to get there took the longest) and the cab ride to my sister’s place was over half and hour so we “arrived” around 1:00 pm.

My sister, Lucille and her husband, Curtis were waiting with bated breath, not so much to see us, but to be able to go have lunch.

We jumped right into it by walking over to the #21 bus and heading towards Notre Dame.

We had lunch at Galway Pub; an Irish Pub near the right bank of the Seine. The waiter we had, Matt, had an Irish accent, but is actually French American. It’s a weird combo but he was a nice guy.

After lunch we trekked along the river and crossed over to see Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. Well, what we could see of it as it’s still closed since the fire in 2019.

We meandered along the river taking in the sites.

A small musical group was finishing up their set as we walked by.

We made our way over to Hôtel de Ville. It’s a whole lot bigger and nicer City Hall than what I’m used to seeing in little ole Red Deer.

We started heading towards the subway to got back to the Moffat’s apartment.

I took a few photos of the building along the way. (Surprising, I know. Or, as the locals would say; “Quelle surprise.”)

We were back at the apartment for a few hours before heading out for supper at an Italian restaurant; Le San Giovanni. I didn’t take a photo of my spaghetti bolognaise but I can tell you it was a whole lot better than the spaghetti I ordered on my first night in Beijing back in 2015.

I did get a photo of my drink though.

It was only a short walk to and from the restaurant but Lynda and I managed to get our 10k steps in. (Unlike our flying day)

We crashed hard for the night around 10:00 pm and sleep came quickly.