Louvre and River Cruise

Wednesday – 22,000 steps

Today we have tickets for 10AM entrance to the Louvre museum. It was about a 2km walk from home, we walked through the Palais Royale gardens on the way there. 

Little alley with shops on our walk to the Louvre

Jardin du Palais Royale

We spent about 3.5 hours in the museum and didn’t even come close to covering the huge amount of treasures that are there. 

Again big line ups if you haven't pre purchased your ticket

Our first stop was to visit the Mona Lisa, I knew this would get busier as the day went on, so this was first stop. Some way the need to stop people from taking selfies. First people take a picture of Mona Lisa, then of a selfie with it in the background, wait there is my husband, lets take both of us with it in the background, oh there is grandma behind us too, lets add her in the selfie too, and then one last shot of the Mona Lisa alone for good luck I guess. Thanks goodness they don’t allow selfie sticks, but enough is enough of these selfies. 

On to visit more masterpieces in the museum, I am sure you could visit here dozens of times and still find new things to see. So much to see from famous painters & paintings, sculptures, Roman and Egyptians antiquities just to mention a few things

To see more picture from the Louvre, see the Louvre page:

https://andreandwendy.blogspot.com/p/louvre.html

We had split up with Marc and Mary-Sue today for the museum visit, just too hard to go with everyone's likes in a museum. We arranged a meeting spot outside that worked out great for the end of the day at the museum.

We moved on the visit the Tuileries Gardens, which had beautiful fountains. 

Tuileries Gardens

Then on to Place de la Concorde where there is a 3,200 year old obelisk.

Place de la Concorde

Getting set up for some type of photo shoot

We also visited a small Formula Wall of fame.

This is a very high end area. Maxim's restaurant is here where main course are $100.

We decide to go back to our apartment for lunch. There is a little alley just down from our apartment that is full of India restaurants, decided to give this a try, we couldn’t find it the other night, but find it today for lunch. We had a great lunch, then back to our apartment for a rest before our Seine River cruise tonight.

We take the metro to where our cruise starts, this is a small boat, we have seen some huge boats on the river giving tours, and are so happy we are on this small boat. It starts off going through some locks to the River, then about 45 minutes each way along the Seine

We end up the Eiffel Tower just as it starts to twinkle, it is really pretty from the water. Fun to see some of the sights we have seen on foot from the river. We had a little rain shower, but nothing too bad, some went inside, but we stuck it out on deck. 

Saw more rats when we got off the boat than any one person should see, we were calling them squirrels to not freak anyone out. Garbage bins were definitely the rats go to place here. 

If you care to see more pictures from the river cruise:

https://andreandwendy.blogspot.com/p/seine-river-cruise.html

We took the metro back home after the cruise, got back at 11:30PM, another fantastic day, looking forward to tomorrow.