Adventure in Europe: Part Four

On Monday we took the Metro straight to the Louvre to spend several hours touring one of the world’s largest museums. We had been warned by several sources that the Louvre can go on forever. Instead of trying to see absolutely everything, we decided to take a more targeted tour of the highlights of the museum. Thanks to a Rick Steves audio guide, we had some guidance on where to go. We saw the biggies: the Venus de Milo, Nike of Samothrace, the Mona Lisa, parts of the Parthenon, as well as the Italian Renaissance and large format French paintings. There was still tons of stuff to see, so after a lunch break, we spent a few hours walking through the German/Dutch painting wings, as well as the Roman, Egyptian, Greek areas. We had heard from guidebooks and others that Mona Lisa is soooooooo small that by the time we got to it, I was practically expecting a postcard. Our expectations were so low, we thought it was a fairly standard sized portrait.
Outside the Louvre
Next we headed across the city to the Arc de Triumph. Since we had the Paris pass, we trudged up the stairs to the top to see the 12 streets that converge into one big traffic circle. Not surprisingly, Sarah even witnessed an accident amongst the chaotic merging of traffic!

The Arc is bigger than Mike Diehl
From there we relaxed a bit at our hotel, and then ate a nice dinner sitting outside at a Parisian café at Le Soufflot Café near the Pantheon. One of the last Parisian sites we saw was the Eiffel Tower that evening. Our wave of crime almost continued when we almost jumped the Metro gate when a ticket machine broke down, but we decided to find a working ticket machine instead to finally end our criminal lives. At night, the Eiffel Tower is well lit with a sparkling light display at the top of every hour. We rode up to the second level (the top level was closed and supposedly didn’t have any better views anyway) and soaked in the Parisian landscape at night.


On our final morning in Paris, we headed to the last of the must-see sights on our list: the Orsay museum. In a manner of speaking, the Orsey museum picks up where the Louvre leaves off, with the rise of Impressionism in art. Sarah and I’s focus was here, as Sarah got to see several paintings she had studied in college by Monet, Renoir, Whistler, Degas, and Van Gough. That afternoon we said au revoir to Paris, and headed by train to French wine country.