We spent the morning at the Louvre seeing the highlights and Napoleon's apartments and having a Gold covered Magnum ice cream bar, which I highly recommend. The museum is huge but I think we covered what we wanted. As a travel note, if you are going to visit a lot of museums, it was suggested that you buy a museum pass. Then you are allowed to skip the lines. I advise this as the lines in Paris are the worst I've seen.
We strolled outside and the rain had returned, even though my trusty iPod had shown sunny skies all day! Liar.
Wasn't bad though so we thought we might be able to squeeze in one more site. So glad we did. We walked to St. Chapelle which is near Notre Dame. It was beautiful and as luck would have it, had Wednesday nocturne hours which meant it was open until 10:00 instead of 6:00 as we had expected. I posted pics of this yesterday but this was our favorite church...well, ok, on the small church scale.
We had dinner near the church and headed home to charge camera batteries. My aspiring photographer with two camera batteries managed to drain one mid-day and didn't have one ready to go in the room.
That evening we headed to the Eiffel Tower for our ascent to the top. I'm not sure what I was thinking when we decided to do this. That is really high up. The lines, as usual, were ridiculous and even though we had timed tickets, we waited at least 30/40 minutes to ascend. In the rain. The view was fine but the clouds were heavy and I wasn't really comfortable bouncing about. Tay got some great pictures with her new lens and we did have fun. Met some nice people and then RAN like crazy to get on the metro.
We had dessert and cafe au lait at our corner brasserie and decided we were both ready to be home. This has been a lot of fun and many, many adventures. But Paris was tiring with the lines and the rain and the people.
I have had this dream for years (like 20) that I return to London to get something and when I try to come home, I can't fit all my things in my luggage and I always miss my plane. I thought maybe by coming back to Europe I would figure out what this dream was all about. I still don't know. I thought maybe my husband was here or, I would run in to an old friend. Maybe it was my youth that I left here...and you can't bring that back from anywhere :) I even contemplated that it was a career that maybe I was supposed to have here that I will discover someday. I still don't know what the dream means but I'll keep working on it.
At the end of the day, this trip was amazing to share with my wonderful daughter. She was a model tourist...trying so hard not to be one. She tried new foods, was polite and tried a few polite foreign phrases and saw beyond the tourism to the people. All things that made me proud.
I might keep blogging about life when we are home. I find it refreshing to reflect at the end of the day. Even the boring days. We won't be traveling any time soon but the next few months will be another kind of journey worth noting. I don't expect you to all read the rest...but thanks for keeping up this far.
See you on the other side...of the pond that is.
Sent from my iPod
Brilliant. Can't wait to hear more stories first hand, face-to-face! You are a good story teller. {-:
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