Gina

I am planning to go on Sep 16 to Paris with 3 <BR>friends and besides the museums we would like to have a "nature-adventure day" . <BR>Does anyone know of any tour close to Paris <BR>either hiking, canoeing or cycling...or <BR>anything close to outdoors activities? <BR>We are 4 girls from the caribbean . Thanks

Christina

I know some good WEB resources if you can read French. First, there are plenty of places to rent bicycles within Paris itself. One of the most well known, which also has some neat group tours of Paris by bike (like at night when the buildings are lit up) is a company called "Paris a Velo, c'est Sympa": www.parisvelosympa.com <BR>Of course, I don't really think you need to go out of your way to do special hiking, I must walk several miles a day when on vacation, especially in Paris. There are plenty of nice, large parks where you could walk a lot (try Parc Monceau in the north or the Bois de Boulogne, it's huge, but not at night). The main French canoe association (Federation Francaise de Canoe-Kayak) is headquartered in Joinville-le-Pont, an eastern Parisian suburb on the RER line and they have canoeing there, I think on the river. Anyway, if you can read some French, here's a great URL of a French portal/search engine like YAHOO (www.nomade.fr), go there and then type in "canoe" in the search box and you should get the names of various canoe clubs and other info (under the rubrique "loisirs_tourisme", sports, sports "nautiques, natation, voile, canoes, kayaks" or some such thing). The URL for the Joinville canoe club is: www.multimania.com/jev/index.html <BR> <BR>There is also a great overall WEBsite for outdoors info and activities in lots of countries at www.gorp.com (the Great Outdoor Recreation Pages). Go there and you can find info on France. The best canoeing is elsewhere, I believe--like down south or southwest (ie, Dordogne, near Pont du Gard, etc). Oh, you don't rollerblade do you? they're sort of obsessed with that in Paris nowadays -- there's a huge roller derby on Friday nights (every other week, I think--I think people meet at Place d'Italie in the 13th arr. and then the police actually lead them to clear the streets and they roller blade several miles; not sure if it's the same route or not, but they go on main, large streets. When I was there this July, I had an apartment about on the corner of rue St-Charles and rue de la Convention in the 15th arr, which is a major street, and they went west on Convention right by my apt. I was really po'd at the noise as it was about 11 pm on a Fri night (I was also always fachee about this noisy bar across the street) until I figured out what it was, and it was sort of cool watching them all skating; there must have been hundreds of them, followed by lots of bicyclists who I guess felt left out.