France: The Final Days (by Jessica)

Day 7:

By day 7, we had seen the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the JLG Booth…pretty much everything there is to see in Paris. Well, almost everything. Day 7 was the long-awaited day of the Louvre. And having read The DaVinci Code just weeks before, I was primed to give Tony the unofficial DaVinci Code tour. We rented some headphones to help us along on our journey through the museum. The audio aide was interesting, but sadly didn’t include everything. Only certain masterpieces were marked for audio commentary. Nevertheless, we found our way to the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, Napoleon’s quarters and of course the café where we enjoyed drinks and brownies. Inspired by the surrounding works of art, I gazed wistfully at the remnants of our brownie for my favorite artist, Antony de Mastiere.



We finished up our tour of the Louvre and headed back to our quaint little hotel with the extra cozy (3 feet by 3 feet) elevator, for a nap. Here’s me and Tony in the elevator. Actually there are 7 of us in this picture…can you find us all?



We found that the best way to see Paris is to get up early and take a bunch of trains to a bunch of different places and walk around and take a bunch of pictures. Then go back to the hotel to take a nap and transfer daytime photos onto the laptop. Then have a late dinner (the sun didn’t go down until 9:00pm!) and see the city at night.


Day 8:

Following our usual pattern, we started day 8 off by taking the train to MontMartre. We saw the famous Moulin Rouge, which, actually means Red Windmill…very sexy red windmill.



While the sex district was very interesting, we were really there to see the church. Atop the hill, we visited Sacre Couer (Sacred Heart Cathedral) and the artists’ quarter. We ate sandwiches jambon et fromage (ham and cheese) and drank cokes on the steps.

On our way back to the train station, we noticed a very peculiar gas station…a store front with pumps right at the curb!



If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I don’t have to say anything about these next shots. We spent Friday night charming the symbol of Paris…with a little coaxing from Tony, she’s very photogenic!



Day 9:

Day 9 was chilly! We needed real French crepes to warm up our morning. We headed back over to the area surrounding Notre Dame and found a great little café (that’s really not too hard to do in Paris). We both had crepes and hot drinks. I had the most chocolate hot chocolate ever! I think you can see that I’m pretty happy with it.



We headed to the Paris Opera House (supposedly this was the model for the opera house in Phantom of the Opera).



We didn’t see the Phantom or Andrew Lloyd Webber nosing around, but we did see some very lovely grand staircases, one with a very handsome man standing on it!



We headed back to MontMartre for the afternoon to visit the very old and very spooky cemetery. Many of the graves were cracked and filthy and there were about 100 stray cats running around. We felt like we were in a horror film until we stumbled upon a couple of graves that made us chuckle and our tummies rumble a little too!



Day 10 was reserved for traveling…from the hotel to the train station, to the airport to LAX to home. It was a very long day. Enough said.

It may seem like we really packed a lot into out short trip, and it’s true, we did. Some days were exhausting, but they were all exhilarating. And we even had time to stop and smell the flowers…well at least I did.