A Rainy Day in Montmartre, Paris

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So, what do you do on a cold and rainy day in Paris? Best answer: visit museums! Unfortunately our museum pass expired the day before and it was our final day in the City of Lights. Our plan was to visit the neighborhood of Montmartre on our final day, so we went, but it wasn’t exactly ideal.

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Montmartre is situated on a large hill in the north of Paris and the winds were certainly whipping that day! We tried to protect ourselves from the rain with an umbrella, but the wind had something else in mind, flipping our umbrella inside out and exposing us to the elements! So, instead of taking the stairs to the terrace at Sacré Coeur, we chose to ride the funicular.

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Our visit to the terrace at Sacré Coeur didn’t last more than a few minutes. We heard the view of Paris from the terrace was worth the climb, but we couldn’t even find the Eiffel Tower in the skyline.

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After our all-too-brief visit to the hilltop, we rode the funicular back down and went off in search of food!

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Not far from the funicular, we found a restaurant/café where we sat outside under an overhang to enjoy some much-needed lunch.

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Because it was a cold and rainy day, we went for comfort food items on the menu- French onion soup and Gorgonzola penne pasta.

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Both were delicious and just what we needed to warm us up on this unusually cool summer day! (Want some more Paris food ideas? Check out our food post!)

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We really wanted to walk around the picturesque streets of Montmartre, with the hopes of buying some type of art from a local artist in the area, but due to the weather, no one had any booths open. We weren’t very far from the Moulin Rouge, so we decided to at least walk there just to say we had seen it.

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Walking to the Moulin Rouge took us through a raunchy part of town with strip clubs and sex shops. Classy!

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Although we wanted to explore (the nicer areas) more, the weather simply wasn’t cooperating. We closed out our time in Montmartre by ducking into a local pastry shop to try a macaroon for the first time.

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They were quite tasty! We ordered one petit caramel macaroon and one petit coconut. (Sam thought he was ordering chocolate when the woman behind the counter said coco, which was actually coconut. It was still yummy nonetheless!)

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All in all, not the day we were hoping for in Montmartre, but it made us all the more grateful for the fantastic weather we had the 3 days preceding! If you’re interested in knowing everything we did during our 4 days in Paris, check out this post!

For a (printable) quick-reference destination guide to what we did during our entire stay in Paris (where we stayed, what and where we ate, activities, money saving tips, etc.), click here.

2 Comments

  1. Mei & Kerstin (from OpenUpNow.net)

    Perhaps it was good to visit Montmartre on a rainy day: that’s when the place is less crowded 🙂 Too bad you didn’t have a walk behind the Sacré Coeur, because that’s much more interesting than the very touristy place just in front of the basilica.

    • Toccara & Sam

      Yea, it was a bummer of a day. Our plan was to walk around and get lost exploring the streets for hours, but the weather had a different agenda for us that day. The rain was one thing, but the wind gusts really made walking around unpleasant. Oh well… guess we’ll have to go back! 😉

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