Thursday, July 18, 2013

Our Paris Vacation - Day 3

Our Paris Vacation - Day 3

Reader beware -- Day 3 was a busy, busy, busy day! That translates to a lot of pictures!  So, I'll do less talking to make up for more pictures.  :-)

Day 3 started at The Louvre.  
The beautiful, the historical, the AMAZING Louvre!





The Arc de Triomphe du Carroussel is right across from The Louvre.  It's not the actual Arc de Triomphe.  Still beautiful, though!


Waiting for our tour to start

The Egyptian Obelisk

The panoramic view brought to you by Michael's iPhone
We met up with our tour and went inside.  The entrance is very modern.  You can look up into the pyramid that you see from the outside.


For the tour, our tour guide had a microphone and we could hear him in our earbuds.  Little did we know this system would be imperative if we were to hear anything our guide had to say!  The Louvre is packed with tons and tons of people!  
We LOVED our tour!!  So much amazing information!
Ready to start the tour!



There's our tour guide!
The Louvre was originally a palace for the French royalties.  Here's what parts of the palace looked like.  AMAZING how old and beautiful these things are!

Listening intently



So. Many. People.


Michelangelo statues
The Venus de Milo


And then it was time to see The Mona Lisa!!!  Our tour guide had prepared us the whole tour for all of the things we were to look for when we saw the portrait.  I was ready to be a good art history student and really study this piece of art.  At least at least until I saw this...

Holy mob scene of people.
We pushed our way through the crowd and turned around for a quick picture.

And one for my mom, too!

This picture doesn't even do the mob justice.

Michael didn't feel the need to push through the crowd for his picture.  We finished the tour and then headed out to the Arc de Triomphe.  We wanted to go see it up close, but they shut it down for some parade something-or-other right when we were headed over.  Bummer!


The Arc de Triomphe is on one end of the Champs-Elysees (which is a street in Paris with a ton of restaurants and shops....most of which are way beyond my wallet's ability).  So we headed down the street, Michael was oogling the fancy cars and Meredith was oogling the fancy shops.  We ended up at the one place Michael wanted to visit during our time in Paris.  Forget the Eiffel Tower and The Louvre!  
Michael was in heaven here at La Duree!  And I must admit, it was pretty heavenly.



Oh, the macaroons....

And the pastries!!!

My happy boy!

Enjoying a little macaroon snack back in our hotel room.

And that is my lemon tart....directly from heaven.  
Oh.My.Yum.

As if that day wasn't full enough, we had a Segway tour of Paris that night!  We were originally scheduled to do that our first night in Paris...but we were stuck in Frankfurt.  So, here we go on the Segways!  
Michael actually has some Segway experience, so he was a little more confident in this whole Segway tour thing.  I was kind of nervous...

Thankfully, we didn't tour Paris until we had a short lesson on how to work this machine! 




We are having SO MUCH FUN!!!

Just a picture of us on the Seine River...


And one with the Eiffel Tower.

By the time the Segway tour was over, it was finally dark out (PS....it doesn't get dark in Paris in the summer until about 10:30pm!).  So we stopped for some pictures with the Eiffel Tower lit up.


We had such a great day, but by the end of the night, we were completely wiped out!  Time to head back to the hotel and crash!


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