By Monday morning we had gotten into a good routine and were actually up and out the door at a more normal hour. We first headed over to the Place de la Concorde, the largest public square in Paris. Not tons there, just a fountain and the obelisk. Way to the east was the Louvre, and to the west the Arc de Triomphe way in the distance.

By the end of this trip even Celia knew to holler for a coin to throw in every fountain we saw. Celia isn’t in most of these pictures because she’s hanging out on my back and fell asleep. After the plaza, we headed over into the Tuileries to the Orangerie museum. We had bought a joint ticket with the Orsay museum.

In the Orangerie museum are Monet’s water lillies. Some of his last works in a giant scale hung in rooms specifically designed to hold them and surround you with his art in several pieces. The waterlilies are painted at different times of day and wrap around two oval rooms. Then there was more impressionist art downstairs as well. We moved quickly as we knew Celia would be waking up and she has almost no tolerance for these museums. Luckily it was pretty small and we got to see most of it in the hour we were there.

Outside of the museum we had a snack and played with one of Rodin’s sculptures called “The Kiss”.

Rodin has his sculptures all over town as he could make multiple copies of them from the same mold.

We finished our snack and decided we’d better head out to find some lunch as these things tend to take time. We walked back through the Tuileries to the east and north of them to try to find a cafe or takeout shop for lunch. We seemed to find a fairly pricy touristy area with a lot of non-food shops, and then a more business area. We continued to amble on our way to try to find something, eventually found a bakery but the line was horridly long, and only got shorter when people ahead of us jumped out of line. On our previous trip to Europe Jordi and I were horrid about wandering the streets trying to find a great place to eat, we knew with the kids we wouldn’t have this kind of leisurely time afforded to us so we were all about meeting the bare minimum needs. Thankfully we found a small grocery store and picked up a few items for a picnic. I also stopped by a super-expensive chocolate shop and picked up some yummy things that I did not share with my children. Jordi got some chocolate covered peanut type thing too.

We then wandered back to the Tuileries and sat down for lunch amongst the business folk on the many chairs and picniced in the glorious sunshine. By that point we had walked almost the entire length of the garden and were just a small bit away from the Louvre. While we had no intentions of going inside, we wanted to show Josie the palace and the glass pyramid entryway that she had pictured in her book. Oh yes we had bought her a ‘where’s waldo’ type book of locations in Paris, except it wasn’t Waldo it was some other guy, and his dog, and a balloon and such to find. It was great way to give her something to do while waiting and bring home some of sights we saw.

At the Louvre we played in the garden a bit, looked at the big horse statues before we headed back to hop on a bus to bring us back to the Eiffel tower.

We were headed for a river boat cruise on the Siene as the girls needed a low key afternoon activity. The boat was loaded with student groups but there were plenty of seats and the girls enjoyed listening to and playing with the speakers with the tour information on it.

The glass topped ship made it almost greenhouse-like inside and kept us a little warm but we got to go around and see the sights from the river. I liked the stories and information but it didn’t wow us too much, we’d be around so much on foot already and some of the sights were very hard to see from down below in the river. I imagine it would be a very neat thing to do at night with the lights on the bridges. After the ride we got some ice cream, walked under the tower one more time, and headed for home to pack up for our trip to Amsterdam and eat the leftovers in the fridge.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2012 at 2:35 pm by Jen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.