After retrieving our many valises we headed for the Gare Centrale to purchase our Navigo Decouverte passes (like the Montreal metro passes). These are very cool (and less expensive than the tourist Paris Visite cards) with photo ID and are reloadable weekly at many available kiosks around Paris. Credit Cards with chips by the way work very well at almost any establishment - including reloading metro cards and renting the Paris version of the Bixie bicyclette in Montreal.
Now we were ready to find a taxi and head into the city. No problem at this point but becasue of the time of day (08:00) what would normally have taken 30 minutes took us 1.5 hours. On the way we noticed Major Pig was MIA. Can you imagine two middle-aged adults freaking out about their missing child. Can`t believe I am even admitting this on the WWW. Thankfully he was recovered in good form on the floor of the taxi.
