Paris

Holy cow, it's been almost two weeks since I posted anything. I'll admit I've been working a lot and Brad and the girls haven't done anything unusual, but the truth is we went to Paris last weekend...let me say that again: Paris :-)

We had a lot of fun - saw the Eiffel Tower. After we waited in a 45 minute line to go up the tower, then walked around taking in all the views we went out to dinner and then headed back to the metro. Fortunately, the metro is right by the museum across from the Eiffel Tower because we got to watch the evening light show. The movie shows a little of it - it was a lot of fun, especially all the street performers taking advantage of the crowds to work for some money.



The next morning we took in some art at the Louvre: (if you could see behind the guy's head, it's the Mona Lisa). While the Mona Lisa was nice, none of us saw why people would come only to see it! You can see the crowds - and this was 30 minutes after the museum opened!! My favorite was the sculptures, some of them were amazingly detailed, down to the lace work at the sleeves and the curls in the hair. We spent several hours walking around and didn't even go through half of the musuem. One of the exhibits that we liked the best was the apartments of Napoleon III, click here for a virtual tour. Ate lunch at a Cafe in the Louvre, where I got both of the girls loving Quiche as much as I do! It was a beautiful day, and we ate out on a balcony of the Louvre under umbrellas. The picture of Kaylee just shows one of the many, many wings.






After the Louvre, we went and walked along the river, checking out all the old buildings and people running around. We walked over to another famous site - Notre Dame. The history is simply amazing, but my favorite part is all the beautiful stained glass windows. After the crowds at the Louvre (which we mostly avoided by not going only to the "famous" sites, which countless people rushed from one to the next so they could take their pictures - I think it's like taking pictures at the zoo, sounds like fun when you do it but looking at the pictures later you wonder what you were thinking!)

As to how we got there - we drove...
We drove, since it was just 6 hours away and we wanted to save some money. It also allowed us to drive through the city and look at the sites. We drove a bunch of circles around the Arc D'Triomphe then headed to our hotel. My gosh - it was the hardest place to find. The map on their web site was wrong, they weren't in GPS, and the address wasn't in our GPS either. We finally parked to walk around since it was in a sea of skyscrapers, and discovered we parked less than a block from it! Fortunately it was right by a metro stop so we parked the car for the weekend and took the trains or walked every where. Our hotel was 1/2 mile from La Defense de Paris, so we walked over there the last evening and saw La Grande Arch. Here's another view from La Defense - you can see the Arc of Triumph in the distance, the two arc's and the Louvre all line up.
We ended the weekend with breakfast at a little French bakery then got the girls their Paris t-shirt (Kaylee) and hoodie (Macie), so they can show them off to all their friends. We bought a big bottle of water and a couple baguettes for the drive home (yum!) and headed back.

One of my favorite parts of the weekend was, though everyone was still talking a foreign language, at least I can read and write French! My vocabulary isn't what it used to be, but I had no trouble understanding anyone! It was so nice :-) Now we're back in Germany - Brad and I really need to sign up for the German Language class!