PARIS!!!

Yea! We made it to Paris before the baby came! My doctor (who I saw for the first time 2 Sat. ago) said we had one more weekend to travel. Jon quickly booked train tickets and hotel rooms and we left Thursday! We got back last night (Sunday). We took 150 pictures, but I will refrain from posting all of them. Here is Paris in 4 days:

DAY 1

*Walk to train station from our house--go to London.
*From London, take train to Paris (going under the English Channel at 100 miles per hour)

*Arrive in Paris, figure out French train station system
*Take subway train to hotel

*Check in to our 2 rooms (one for me and Hannah and one for Jon, Em and Ray)

*Find closest restaurant, which is an Italian pizza place (ah, memories of Rome!)

*We all happily fall asleep--exhausted, full of pizza and dreaming of adventures to come

DAY 2

*Take train to Eiffel Tower--it's a 2+ hour wait to go up, so we appreciate the view from the bottom while eating our breakfast (we chose picnic style over the Eiffel Tower cafe which is $300 per person!) We took many pictures of the Eiffel Tower because it was so amazing from every angle. It's 1,000 feet high, over 100 years old and can be seen from all over Paris.

*Then we took a bus across Paris giving ourselves our own tour guide of the sites

*Next we went to Notre Dame. Jon and I appreciated it from inside-out, but the girls only enjoyed feeding/chasing the pigeons outside. Emily's best line, "Why is this place so important?"

The outside of Notre Dame is massive with ugly gargoyles and beautiful stained glass windows.

*On to the Louvre. It was HUGE! I don't have any great shots of the Louvre outside, but inside we saw some good stuff. We saw parts of 1 wing--there were still 2 to go!

Rachel with Venus (the goddess of love) and the famous Mona Lisa (small but still mysterious)

*Then we went back to the Eiffel Tower to try our luck with the lines, but they were still 2 hours, so we found a kids' park close by, played in the sand and watched the sunset. We walked to Trocadero Square, which has the best view of E.T., and watched the 10 minute show of glittering lights. Hannah was mesmorized. From then on she called E.T. "Nannah's Tower!"

DAY 3

*Another great view of E.T. is from the Montparnasse Tower--not a beautiful building, but it has an awesome 360° view of Paris

*We push our luck at another great art museum--the Musee d'Orsay--it houses Europe's greatest Impressionist collection in an old train station

*We have pushed too far! The girls are losing it, so we ditch the rest of the museum and our plans to see the Rodin statue gardens and Napoleon's Tomb and Les Invalides Army Museum to go outside to play on huge animal statues!

*We take it easy for the rest of day and pretend like we live here. We pick up dinner at a French bakery and have a picnic near all the sites we wanted to see. We play tag, watch lawn bowling and soccer and eat great Parisian pasteries.

DAY 4

*We start our last day at Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe and have fun learning about why it's "so important"--it has (among other symbolic things) the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from WW1

*Next we walk down the famous Champs-Elysees boulevard ("one of the world's grandest, most elegant, and celebrated streets, home to big business, celebrity cafes, glitzy nightclubs, high-fashion shopping, and international people-watching." It's a Parisian Magnificent Mile. We hit the Disney store (has anyone seen Ratatouille?) then end at the Place de la Concorde (where 2,780 people were beheaded with the guillotine). The guillotine is gone, but it's a beautiful square with big fountains and an Egyptian obelisk.

*The girls and I have a fun time at the Luxemborg Garden kids' play park even though it rains.

*Time to go home. The girls get ready for life in England again by watching Mary Poppins on the train.

Thoughts on Paris?

We loved it! It was clean, beautiful, and felt spacious. The food was good. The train and bus systems were cheap and easy to use. There were gardens and parks throughout the city for picnics and running around. The pigeons were nice. Saying 'bonjour' and 'merci' all day was fun. Everything we did felt romantic. There was a lot to see and do but it didn't feel overwhelming. I am looking forward to the next time we get to go.