Embracing Our Inner Griswolds

Can even the most clichéd tourist destination in the world hide some surprises?

T he summer of 2022 was the season of “revenge tourism,” and my family was out for vengeance.

“Revenge tourism” meant taking a big trip in 2022 after plans for 2020 and 2021 were canceled or heavily altered, as Covid-19 made travel difficult or impossible. This past spring, my wife looked up the airfare rates to big European cities and was pleasantly surprised to see that Air France to Paris was the least expensive option. (Alas, “least expensive” is not a synonym for “not expensive.”)

From the moment we said, “We’re going to Paris this summer,” my younger son started asking about going to the top of the Eiffel Tower. It’s the one thing everybody knows about France. If someone says “Paris” or “France,” your mind likely instantly pictures the tower, along with accordion music, and perhaps a mime and plates of brie and snails. If a movie has a scene where they’re calling a character in Paris, they’ll almost always be in front of a window with the Eiffel Tower in the background.

I was blessed in many ways growing up, but my family never traveled abroad when I was a kid, and once my wife and I became parents, we knew we wanted to take the kids overseas at some point and show them there’s a big world out there, from palaces to poverty, to broaden their horizons. (It’s all too easy to feel like a bad day in school means the end of the world.) But after the multi-year, Covid-induced hiatus from overseas travel, I now had one teenager and one near-teenager, and they’re not as easily impressed. (Those were the good old days. The first time we stayed in a hotel room, my younger son exclaimed, “Daddy, they have a phone!”)

With teenagers, the siren’s call of the cell phone and headphones grow louder, and the temptation to shrug and utter “meh” is stronger. When you’re a teenager, there’s considerable risk to allowing yourself to be impressed; that would mean you haven’t seen everything, and if you haven’t seen everything, you can’t know everything, and if you don’t know everything, it opens the door to the possibility that your parents know something you don’t. And what teenager wants to admit that?

Veteran vacationers had warned us that, “Everything is closed in Paris in August,” as seemingly the entire capital heads to the beaches in the South for the month — part of that joyously leisurely pace of life that leaves the French mystified as to why their GDP growth is so slow, compared to those workaholic, stressed-out Americans. What those past travelers meant is that a decent number of stores, and a minority of restaurants, have French-language signs that say something along the lines of, “Bonjour, loyal customers! Our store, which has specialized in the sale of rare luxury quill pens, artisan berets, and hand-crafted monocles since 1894, will be taking our traditional vacation from July 26 to August 30. See you soon!“ [Okay, don’t rely on my French translation skills.]

My wife, an indisputable sophisticate who’s been around the world and makes me look like a Neanderthal, balked at my younger son’s vision. Going to the top of the Eiffel Tower is just about the most clichéd American tourist act imaginable. We would walk past it and take lots of photos, but in my wife’s mind, using a big chunk of our limited and precious time in Paris to stand in line to ascend the Eiffel Tower would complete our transformation into the Griswold family.

It was “bad” enough that we had to visit the other top cliché of a Paris vacation, the Louvre Museum. The Louvre is the artistic equivalent of the U.S. military’s “shock and awe” campaign, relentlessly barraging your eyes with so many seemingly endless hallways of Renaissance and worldly art that all the masterpieces start to look the same: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, all the Ninja Turtles, one after another. The Louvre is unparalleled, but it is almost too much of a good thing; it feels like every painting created across Europe over the course of two centuries of the Renaissance ended up in one place. If you ran quickly enough through a hallway with all the paintings of the Crucifixion in a row, the image would move like a flip book.

My wife really wanted to carve out time to see the Musee d’Orsay, a human-scaled museum built out of a converted train station, heavier on the Manets and the Monets and the Impressionists. Having the Musee d’Orsay as your city’s second-best and second-most-famous art museum is like having Steve Young backing up Joe Montana — there’s a strong argument the backup is even better than the starter. The question is, how well would the kids handle two lengthy visits to two massive art museums in three days? Vacationing abroad is already a continuous spinning-plate balancing effort of keeping track of who’s hungry, who’s thirsty, and who needs to pee. (France is allegedly a sophisticated, civilized country, but apparently, they’ve banned water fountains and free public bathrooms.)

Meanwhile, my younger son was not-so-subtly wondering why we came all this way, only to dangle what he wanted in front of his eyes and then not let him actually go up into the tower. I told him to think of Moses, able to lead us to the promised land, but unable to enter.

When we walked by the Eiffel Tower the previous day, the lines for tickets and entry stretched to Disneyland lengths, with little or no shade. And just as I suspected, all the tickets to go to the top were long since sold out; the Eiffel Tower management boasts that it is the most-visited monument in the world, with almost 7 million visitors per year.

But then, when I perused the remaining options online, I saw it: We could go to the second floor of the Eiffel Tower, and enter at a convenient early afternoon time, for just ten Euro each!

There was just one small catch: We had to take the stairs.

The Eiffel Tower has three levels, with the lesser-known bottom two formed by those horizontal lines in the iconic structure. Most visitors buy tickets well in advance and take elevators that rise on an angle to the second floor, then take a second elevator all the way to the top, 906 feet above the ground. But for procrastinators like us, 328 steps to the first floor awaited, followed another 346 steps to the second floor, all on somewhat narrow but sturdy cast-iron stairwells built into the four iconic base legs.

It was resolved — after a morning at the Musee d’Orsay, we would climb the tower and everyone would get what they wanted; this meant I had effectively just signed us up for rigorous session of the StairMaster, right after a few days of walking around Paris so much that the FitBit on my wrist offered a measurement that simply read, “What, you think you’re an athlete now?”

I don’t hate heights, but I’m not exactly on buddy-buddy terms with them, either. The higher we climbed those stairwells, the more we felt those summer winds in the open-air, fenced-in stairways. My rational mind knew that falling would require scaling the tall fences and somehow evading the netting beneath us . . . but my heart rate and adrenaline kept reminding me that I was ascending higher and higher, with a mere 2.5 million or so rivets and the very finest 19th-century engineering keeping me aloft.

Considering the fame of the tower, it’s amazing how you almost never hear about or see many images of the first floor, a shaded, breezy, mini-Shangri-La terrace with a champagne bar, snack shop, ice-cream shop, gift shop, lots of lounge chairs, bean-bag chairs, a swing, and a large restaurant . . . that was closed. (“It is August, monsieur.”) There are patches of (somewhat scratched and foggy) glass flooring where you can feel like you’re sitting on air. The kids had ice cream, I guzzled water, and we took selfies and pictures from each direction. The most clichéd tourist destination in the world had managed to surprise us.

Then, rehydrated and somewhat rested, we began the second, slightly longer climb, watching the elevators pass us by. Every now and then we would pass some tourist getting unnerved by the increasing height. “Don’t look down!” someone would inevitably say — as if the whole point of the endeavor hadn’t been to climb to the pinnacle and then look down.

The second floor is closer to what we expected, something akin to the observation deck of the Empire State Building — smaller and more crowded, with walkways a little awkwardly leading you around the massive girders with some smaller, more cramped gift shops and snack spots. The expansive vistas of Paris are as spectacular as you would imagine, but the effort of the tiring trudge made the view feel earned. We get to feel a little smug over the rest of the tourists who took the elevators — their ascent passed in a matter of moments! Our view slowly and subtly changed, landing by landing, minute by minute.

And then, after a few moments on the second floor, that vacation magic occurs — everyone in the family is enjoying themselves; it’s not just that my younger son got his way, but by traipsing up the stairs, we’ve now truly experienced the Eiffel Tower. We’ve seen it, and the surrounding city, from every angle, gaining a better appreciation of the Herculean effort it took to build the structure, and how it must have seemed like an alien spaceship or Tower of Babel when it was constructed in the late 1880s. (The French writer Guy de Maupassant reportedly ate lunch in the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant every day for years — because, he reportedly said, it was the only place in Paris where he could sit and not see the tower.) We’ve spent hours in the city, gradually ascending and descending, and now we’ve experienced a certain symmetry; the previous day, we had visited the Paris Catacombs, so we had seen (almost) the very top and the very bottom of the city.

The teenager, the near-teenager, and my sophisticated wife all say taking the stairs was worthwhile; that option meant almost no time waiting in line, we weren’t crammed into an elevator with scores of other tourists, and now we’ve got a great story of climbing what seemed like a million stairs. Score one for Dad. The only complaints were coming from my feet and my hamstrings.

It turns out those 7 million visitors make the journey atop the tower for a reason, and there can be great joy in doing something, even if it’s considered a little cliché. There’s even some fun in living up (or down) to that Griswold image.