Day 2 - Paris

After a quick breakfast of fruit and bread with coffee, we headed to the Louvre where we spent the morning.  What an amazing place!  We saw sculptures by Donatello and Michelangelo and so many others.  We saw paintings by de Vinci - including the Mona Lisa. I was surprised at how small that was.  Some were so huge.
The Louvre building itself was also a work of art.  Carvings, inlaid wood floors, beautiful handrails.  The outside had statues and scroll work all around.  (I was too tired to write last night, and I apologize for forgetting so much detail in what I wanted to say.)  The whole place was so big that I think we could have gone back morning and afternoon for a week and not seen everything. 
We decided to go get some lunch and then go check out the Musee d'Orsay which has more of the nineteenth century painters like Michelangelo and Degas.  When we got there, we were shocked to find a Disneyland style serpentine line out the front door of people waiting to get in.  We decided the best time to do a museum was first thing in the morning.
So we sat outside in the warm sun people watching for a while.  We wanted to do a night tour of Paris but the place to sign up was blocks away.  I woke up with a head cold and was low on energy, so we were trying to decide  what to do.  As we sat, I noticed a PediCab not far away.  We asked about the price to pedal us over, and the way I was feeling, it was a small price to pay. Our driver was an adorable young man from Sweden who pointed out landmarks and talked about how long he'd been in Paris.
We wandered the back streets of the area and it looked much more like the Paris of my imagination.  Narrow streets, little shops, lots of people walking, talking, laughing.  It was a fun evening.  We ate dinner at a restaurant where we were convinced by the proprietor that we must stay, and he would give us free cocktails.  The food was great.  We figured it was good advertising to have someone sitting at the outside tables at the beginning of the dinner hour.
The night tour was wonderful  Everything lighted up in an amazing style.  The Eiffel Tower (20,000 lights), the Arc de Triomphe, the palaces.  So many spotlights hidden in trees to illuminate the beautiful old facades of these buildings that could be artwork in themselves.  We sat atop a double-decker bus in the open snapping  pictures. I did discover that as good as my camera is in the daytime, it didn't do so well at night.  (Maybe I just need to learn more about settings, etc.)
By the time we took the Metro back to our hostel, I was dragging.  Amy and Amber stayed up booking our train tickets for today, but I went to bed, and morning came amazingly fast.
So today, we're leaving Paris and heading to Angers and from there to Argenton, where Lori's house is.  Tune in again as My Journey Continues. . . .