After a late night into Paris, we were hoping for a sleep-in. Alas, a certain young lady was awake at 7am on the dot, sigh…..

We must say, she has been excellent with the long days and all the travel. She normally catches up on sleep on our quieter days and we were hoping for some long sleep today as we are off to Sweden tomorrow.  She was a bit grumpy and tired in the morning, which was understandable. Luckily she keeps her bad behaviour for when we are not in public.  So we can’t complain too much.

Our morning was pretty uneventful. Catching up on washing and repacking the bag for the next trip.  Astrid is quite the seasoned traveller now and is preferring to sit *in* the bags…. sadly I don’t think we can check her with our luggage.

While Nic caught up on washing, Anto ventured to the Australian Embassy to check on our passport situation. The agreed we probably need new ones due to the water damage, but we couldn’t get them today as they take 48 hours and we have to travel tomorrow.  Hopefully they don’t get checked going into Sweden. We are likely to have them checked going into the UK, so we will have to get new ones before that.  An unexpected expense, that is really cutting into our croissant and chocolate budget.  Fingers crossed we make it to Sweden and back without any passport issues……..

Astrid did not take advantage of her day of rest and decided to have a bit under a 2 hour sleep. Normally we wouldn’t mind but it wasn’t ideal today. It is also finally properly cold here. We haven’t had too many really cold Paris days (read under 10 degrees maximum). Most of the cold weather has been other countries we have visited, but it didn’t really get above 6 degrees today. Undeterred, we rugged up and headed to the park for a play.  On this outing we had a confirmed sighting of our first proper Parisian poodle, with fluffy ball tail and all. I wasn’t quick enough to get a photo, but there is still hope we will see another one. It has taken 6 weeks to actually see a Parisian poodle and we were starting to doubt they existed. We had seen 2 poodles in our travels. One walking the streets of Montreux Switzerland and the other at Central station, Amsterdam….. but none in Paris, until today.

After a play in the park we stopped at a cafe in our street for hot chocolate to warm up. Astrid has become quite the fan, and we will have to wean her off them when we get home. She doesn’t realise we water her hot chocolate down with straight milk. I can only imagine how happy she would be if she tasted the real thing…….. Especially as we have discovered some hot chocolates that are pretty much straight chocolate, rich and delicious!

Finally, here is a photo of some our stash from our Brussels and Amsterdam trip:

We are back to Belgium later in our trip so we may have to find some more chocolate to add to our stash before we get home.  In the meantime Sweden awaits. We are hoping not to freeze to death…….