Long, long day! I ended up sitting with 6 children in the seats directly around me. All but one was 6 or under -- including triplet 3 year olds and an infant. Any time a mother continually reassures the people around her that "really, they're great travellers!" assume there's a reason she's saying it so many times. EEK! I didn't get a wink of sleep the whole trip -- not good as when we landed it was 9 am Paris time (and 2 am Dallas time). I was quite worn out and grumpy by the time I met up with Andy at the airport!
We grabbed a taxi and headed for our hotel. At this point, I was really hoping they'd let us check in at 11:30 even though check-in wasn't until 3 pm. Thankfully, they did. The gal went on and on about how they were upgrading our room to a larger room, on the corner, on the 6th (top) floor. She called it their "superior room". She built that darned room up . . . I was expecting the Taj Mahal! Imagine our surprise when we walked in and saw this:
I didn't just take a picture of part of the room, that's pretty much it! Wall to wall furniture with only about 2 feet on either side of the bed. There was a desk on the other side and a lamp/small chair in the corner. . . but there wasn't much walking room between the desk and the bed. Poor Andy, after I'd already settled into "my side" of the bed, we figured out that he couldn't even stand up straight on his side of the bed, as the ceiling was sloped. I had to wonder what our "inferior" original room would've looked like! I was so happy to see that bed though . . . we laid down for about a 2 hour nap.
After that, we headed to Notre Dame. The guy Andy was there to meet wasn't in that office on Monday, so Andy had the afternoon with me. Thankfully, my friend Erin had given me some information on some of the sights of Paris, so I had some information to pass along to Andy. Notre Dame has the statues of the 28 kings of Judah running along the outside of the building. During the French Revolution, they were mistaken for the Kings of France and the heads were chiseled off. We also were able to see the gargoyles . . . made famous (for our kids at least) by The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We went on inside and walked around the inside, looking at all the sculptures, the paintings, the stained glass. Afterwards, we headed back outside to take another look.
After that, we headed over to Isle St. Louis to hit this ice cream place called Berthillon . . . makers of the best ice cream in Paris. We finally found their storefront, only to discover they were closed for the month of August -- August is when most people in France take their vacation . .. sometimes for the whole month! We knew this before we left and knew we'd miss out on some things because we were going during their vacation month. While we were unable to get icecream at Berthillon, we could still buy Berthillon ice cream all over the city . . . and did just that. Andy got 1 scoop of vanilla and 1 of white chocolate. . . I got 2 scoops of chocolate with orange pieces in it. YUMMY!
We ended up the afternoon with a visit to the Pompidou. . . all the pipes are on the outside of the building! Of course, Andy stood there and tried to figure out what each color pipe was for.
We finished up by eating dinner and going to bed early -- so that we could get up the next day for a full day of work for Andy and a full day of touring for me.
