Paris with Kids

When we finally emerged, after more than an hour of sensory deprivation in the sewers, Paris seemed more dazzling and inviting than ever. The boys ran along the Seine, seemingly content to soak up the sun and beauty and appreciate life's little pleasures -- like breathable city air.

* * *

Travel can be stressful, especially in a big city when you've got a tired kid trailing behind you, saying things like "Do we have to look at more impressionist paintings?!"

Scratch below its Grand Tour surface, and Paris can please all but the hardest cases of budding adolescent attitude. I'm no expert on kid behavior, but my theory is that investing time in something kids find cool can pay parents back handsomely.

On Sunday, the morning after our arrival in Paris, we set out for the city's most popular turn-'em-loose destination, Parc de la Villette: a more than 100-acre collection of parks, exotic gardens, playful environmental features, playgrounds, theaters, performance spaces and hands-on museums spanning the Our Canal. Opened in the 1980s on the site of what was once a meatpacking district, la Villette is the product of a team of dozens of architects and is one of the great modern open spaces of Europe.

To get there, we took a canal boat ride from the Musee D'Orsay and the Seine, under the Place de la Bastille and up the Canal St. Martin -- a long, slow, aquatic amble through some of Paris's most picturesque tree-lined neighborhoods.

On foot, we could have done the trip in a fraction of the 2 3/4 -hour ride, but that wasn't the point. This journey required us to pass through nine canal locks -- with lots of century-old equipment and gushing walls of water -- as well as several mechanical swing bridges.

Entry to la Villette is free, though specific attractions have fees. We could have spent the day -- a rare cloudless, sunny day -- in the park. But we had a destination: la Villette's Cite des Sciences et de l'Industrie, a massive glass-and-steel science museum with a 112-foot reflective glass geodesic dome, La Geode, parked out front.

The Cite des Sciences is everything its name promises: a veritable city of science and technology. Its three stories of open Tinkertoy architecture, with massive steel beams and skylights, resemble more a mega-mall than a museum. It's got food courts, exhibit halls dedicated to aeronautics, light, sound and volcanoes, an aquarium, a planetarium, 3-D films and a theater with moving seats. La Geode houses an Omnimax theater. (Exhibits are bilingual in English, and theater presentations provide free foreign-language headphones.)

"This," my son said as we rode up an escalator, "is like a dream school."

On this Sunday, the place was jammed with thousands of kids and parents coming for "Star Wars l'Expo," a "Star Wars" extravaganza of props, scale models, podracers, costumes, weaponry and special effects running through Aug. 27. Similar to the "Star Wars" show that opened about the same time in Boston, this one (pronounced "Stah Wahrz") is trumpeted as being larger -- at least in France. The exhibition is also organized differently -- around "planets" where the films were set, so the visitor can follow a logical flow, say, from the moon of Endor to Tatooine and Naboo, etc.

Such order, I'm afraid, would be lost on our group, and as far as I could tell, most others. Standing in line for our timed entry (we avoided a long wait by ordering tickets online), we heard strains of "Star Wars" theme music -- which prompted most boys in line, including my son and Mathieu, to act out imaginary lightsaber battles -- complete with sound effects.