Car Tour, Anyone?

The wedding feast picture.

people standing behind the rail to see Mona.

looking at Mona

the kids and Mona

Notre Dame stained glass

I write this last nite but we had internet trouble and couldn't get it or the pics on. I'll try again.
We began this morning with a yummy breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, bagettes, croissants, rolls with sucre (sugar) on them, lots of yummy stuff. Then we began our tour of Paris with our private guide- Jean. Poor Jean. We TRIED to tell him to just go straight to where we were going to visit and to leave off all the extras but he's so knowledgable about Paris and loves his history he just kept starting, and stopping and going round and round and starting and stopping and MORE round and round and 30 minutes later Ellie's yummy breakfast was all over her, her clothes, me, my clothes and Jean's nice clean van. We cleaned up as best we could and went on.
First we went to the Catherdral of Notre Dame. It is amazing. The stained glass windows are gorgeous. It would be great to do church in there, too. We could just see Quasimoto swinging from the gargoyles on the outside.

Then we walked down a little market street. The fruits and veggies and cheeses and sweets were arranged so nicely. We also walked through a pretty little churchyard. The neat thing about the churchyard is there was a large, tall, wide was covered with thick vines and the wall was WHISTLING. It was full of birds! They were praising their Creator with all their might.

Next came the Louvre. Oh my. It is MASSIVE! There is nothing in the US to compare it to. It's shaped like a U. If you used the Capitol building in DC as the bottom of the U and pushed all the Smithsonians together to form the sides, it still wouldn't compare. Jean said of all the collections the Louvre has, only 10% of them are on display. Tucker later said he believed it, they only put one statue in each room! It is very spacious. We went just to see the Masterpieces. We saw Venus de Milo (more nekkedness but very famous), the Winged Victory (clothed but had no head), 5 of Leonardo de Vinci's "other" paintings and of course, her royal wonderfullness the MONA LISA. We liked her. Ellie and I especially liked how her eyes followed you across the room. She was bigger than I expected, I had been told awhile back that she was very small (you were right, Tricia!). She had a wall all to herself. On the other side of the room was a painting that I had put in the kids scavenger hunt but I had no idea how big IT would be! It's about Jesus at the Wedding Feast in Caanan and it is enormous. You think my map in my house is big! Jean said it's square footage is that of most Paris apartments. :) We also saw another of similar size of the Coronation of Napoleon. The humorous thing about that painting is that he is coronating his wife, Josephine. Jean said there couldn't be one of N being coronated because he coronated himself. He didn't want anyone higher than him and to have someone coronate him would show he wasn't the highest. Nice ego.

We tried to convince Jean to take us back to the hotel (Ellie had gotten sick again) but ended up going to see MontMarte, driving by the Arc de Triumph and several other places (more stopping, going, stopping, going round and round) before he took us back. Drew Preston was on the verge of losing it by then. Besides the sick episodes we really enjoyed Jean's tour! Sullivan thought it was awesome.

I took advantage of the time to try to do a little shopping. I went all around the shops near the hotel and do you know I didn't find ONE thing!!!??? Everything is really really expensive and nothing caught my eye anyway. I really wanted a pretty white blouse or just some cute flip flops from Paris. Oh well. I did find a cool grocery store and bought some cheese, croissants, and apples for the crew. Yum. Normandy tomorrow!