Having experimented with the Velib rental bikes (http://prashanthchengi.livejournal.com/77523.html), I knew it was a nice enough system. There are quirks in the system, for instance, when a defective bike shows up as 'available' on the app/website, and the fact that they don't provide a simple way for the user to mark a bike as defective. That said, the company makes regular inspections, or sends out repair crew, when a particular bike doesn't get picked up for several hours. The bike with the punctured tire that I spotted in the morning? It wasn't there in the evening, so it was evidently fixed and returned to service.

After I was finished with the day's work, I found a nearby supermarket where I purchased some spare AA batteries for my Garmin GPSMAP64st GPS. With this device, I'm totally confident of finding my way around, even in a foreign country, even when I don't have data service availability on my mobile phone. That said, one must do some testing prior to setting out into the city. For instance, in Paris, there is a concept of administrative districts called 'arrondissements', and you need to know the name/number of the arrondissement, if you need to lookup an address with the GPS. In other countries, this information is simply the name of the city, but 'Paris' brings up nothing of interest, in the GPS. It can be a bit frustrating, if you need to remove your glove to fiddle with the buttons on the GPS device, in near freezing conditions (it was 2°C last night!) to find a place. If you lookup a place however, it stays in the history, and you can even mark the location, making future lookups easy.

Pro tip: If you want to visit a bunch of monuments/landmarks, it's a good idea to check their locations before hand, to order them correctly, so you don't do unnecessary riding back and forth.  Also, look up their proper addresses online, so you can pre-search them on the GPS, thereby having the locations in your 'search history'; this will save you time and effort later.

The buttons and scroll bar are more than adequate searching and finding locations on the device, but it could be hard to do that with a gloved hand. My fingers were going numb when I took off the glove and fiddling with the GPS, to try and find something. Pre-searching would mean that you can access that location within three clicks.

I rented a Velib bike and took off. On my way, I decided that I wouldn't bother with the 'clock watching'; I had a bike that was working well and the conditions were near freezing. Even if I found a bike station right on my way, I'd have to stop, park the bike, wait two minutes, remove my gloves, pull out the ticket and enter the ticket number and my code on the machine and then request for the bike again. Far too much bother, and it would quite take the fun out of sightseeing, so I thought I'd simply hold on to the bike till I found a bike station near my hotel.

I rode along the Seine, passing by the Musee d'Orsay and other pretty sights, which I stopped to take pictures of.

And then I got within sight of the Eiffel Tower.

The sheer size of the tower grabs you every single time you get to its foot.

There was a Velib station close to the Tower, and there were plenty of bikes (obviously a lot of people get there on bikes and proceed on foot to photograph the tower). I found a single empty slot, and I put the bike there, and proceeded to shoot some more. I really should have shot more with shorter exposure times, but it was dark, and being the amateur I am, I shot 1/3 second exposures, clearly too long for a non-stabilized shot, as you can see, in the pic above, but I enjoyed the experience and the majestic view which I took in, with my Eye Balls, Mark I.  When I returned however, there was some kind of network issue with the bike station, which meant that all of the bikes were suddenly no longer accessible. I'm sure Velib rectified the issue fairly quickly, but I asked a passerby for directions to the next nearest station, and dropped into a souvenir shop for some purchases, and also an Indian/Pakistani restaurant for a takeaway dinner, before getting another bike. After I got the bike, I rode straight back to the hotel, and dropped off the bike at the station nearest to the station. I found that I'd only been charged an extra Euro, as the longest time I used a single bike was for less than an hour.

It was a very enjoyable evening, despite the cold.