The Big Three

Wednesday July 24

Having bought a two day museum pass the tourists made their way to Louvre this morning. With 16 km of corridors they were only ever going to have a once over lightly viewing. They decided to cherry pick the greats using the museum map. Even this proved difficult at times as there are up and down stairs all over the place and all the corridors were crowded.

 We did get to see the Venus de Milo.

  Leonardo de Vinci's Mona Lisa 

 The Lacemaker by Jan Vermmer

However the place was teaming with tourists and it was hard to get a close up look at any of these. The Louvre is a place where photos are allowed to be taken so there were tourists with cameras all over the main sights. 

They  stayed long enough to need lunch and spent another hour after that looking at the Napolean 1st appartments and some of the Fleimsh and Dutch painters works.

it was  then over to Notre Dame Cathedral. It is the 850 anniversary of the Cathedral and they have built a special temporary entrance way with some stained glass windows that have never been on show before. 

 A free tour was offered  in English. The guide was Italian and she spoke excellent English. She was on a month long volunteer tourist programme where she gave tours free along with lots of other people fro other European countries. She apologised for her English but she not have as she spoke perfect English. She had come to France to practice her French and English. 

After a rest we went and had a meal in our local area. We then caught a train over to to the Eiffel tower. We thought it woud be great to go up on the evening and see Paris by night. Well so had every other tourist in Paris it seems. It was a blamy evening and when we arrived there was a huge queue waiting to go up. We were offerred to go to queue at another tower so we left the queue we were in and when we got there it was a smaller queue but it ws for the Stairs! Well none of us was keen to climb the first two levels by stairs so we went and joined a lift tower queue. We estimated that we woule have to wait at least an hour to get on the first lift and they were advertising a 45 min wait to get to the top level. Then a sign flashed up to say that warning, they were at saturation on the top level. Quick family meeting and we hatched a new plan. We would go home and come back early in the morning. Louise asked at the information what time they opened and they told her 9am but said be here by 8.30. So we headed home and stared to time the journey.It took overan hour with the walking each end. It looked like a really early start so Mary sugested a taxi would probably be best on this occasion. Eveyone was happy about this as the trip involved two changes and lots of walking.

For everyone this ended up as a reasonably early night, which was a good idea as we were going to have make an early start the next day.