I love visiting Paris. Luckily, I have therefore visited many times, generally staying for a week or two.I have stayed at many different hotels and many different locations, although always in the Paris city itself. This costs more, especially since the choice of wheelchair accessible accommodation is limited, but the joy of walking out of your door into the centre of Paris is just too fabulous to miss. I have included posts of a few places I have visited, and stayed, including access information and photos.
Some parts of Paris are hilly, especially around Sacré-Cœur and Montmartre. Many places are very crowded of course. Often, my partner and friends grab a Vélib rental bike and we zoom around together. We always go the opposite way in the many one-way streets, enabling us to see any cars coming and doors opening. Last trip I noticed that the bike lanes marked in one-way streets now direct the bikes to go in the opposite direction to the traffic. Sensible! Parisians also refuse and are not compelled to wear helmets, making the system much more popular.
Access to most museums, art galleries and so on is free for wheelies and one companion, and queueing is unnecessary. I suggest you go to the exit or entrance and talk to an usher, rather than waiting on a long queue to find that the place is inaccessible for that queueing was unnecessary for wheelies.
Some people complain about access at galleries such as the Louvre. I think it’s brilliant, you can get everywhere in this ancient multilevel palace, although once or twice a lift has been out entailing a roundabout trip.
The cafés are fabulous, the bridges are great, take a boat on the Seine, learn some French, swoon over the pastries, go home with a baguette under your arm (a real one, they come out morning and afternoon, not a fake one from a supermarket) and especially visit a cemetery to contemplate the transience of celebrity among other deep concepts.
