Europe Trip, Part 1: Paris

Here is the long awaited Europe trip post, sorry for the delay.
We started out via ferry from Dover to Dunkirk and drove into Paris, arriving at 12:30 am in the morning. Prior to leaving, we had bought a European road atlas, which was actually useless, as it only showed where the major cities were and those are easily locatable via road signs; when we got into Paris, we spent 1 1/2 hours driving around, trying to use Zac's high school French to ask directions to my cousin's studio flat, which we finally and gratefully found. Our first day in Paris was Easter, and we went to a Easter brunch with Americans studying in Paris (very nice people) before setting out on our own to explore. The weather was slightly rainy but the sun did make an appearance later. We came out of the metro station and immediately in view was the Eiffel Tower, incredible! Also incredible was the size of the line at the Louvre Museum; sadly, we weren't even given the option of waiting in it, as they closed the line due to overcrowding.
We then walked all around along the Seine, to Notre Dame, and the Musee d Orsay (also ridiculous long line) and anything else we could stumble across.
Easter also happening to be Zac's birthday, we went out to celebrate at a Breton cafe (the sort of Britishy region of France) serving buckwheat crepes and cider- an interesting but delicious pairing.
The next day, as advised by my savvy cousin, we rented bikes to cruise around the city. Its a great deal: you pay 1 euro for 24 hours access to bikes all across the city; the only catch is that you can't keep any one bike more than 30 mins.
We hopped on and rode to the Eiffel Tower, where we enjoyed a picnic lunch of cheese and bread on the lawn beneath. The flowers were all out and it was a beautiful Sunny Day. However, it being Easter Monday, which is a public holiday in France, the line to go up had about 400 people in it, so we decided to forgo that pleasure and contented ourselves instead with attempting to get far enough back from it to get the whole tower in our camera's viewfinder (no small task).
After seeing the Tower, we rode across the river (riding next to it was miserable as it is mostly cobblestones) to the Arc De Triomphe and the Champ Elysees (the avenue that runs through it). We dodged traffic ala "Frogger" in order to walk underneath it; it was hard to imagine what it must have been like to see the Nazis marching through it.
The last thing we did was the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, a huge place with loads of famous people buried, including Oscar Wilde. As we showed up minutes before it closed for the night, however, all we saw were a few pretty mausoleums of no one in particular.
Erica's Favorite Part: Riding bicycles from place to place.
Zac's Favorite Part: Eating buckwheat crepes