Au revoir Paris

First French chat – in Pere Lachaise cemetery.
Plenty of chiens (mostly silly little ones) but
no chats. Where are they?

Big Meccano set.

We'll always have Paris darling…

Hi folks - I know you're hanging out for the next installment (ha ha!!) but erratic internet has prevented it until now!! 

We said a sad au revoir to Paris today, though we are all tuckered out from heavy touring. By the end of the afternoon and yet another metro ride it felt like it was time to put our feet up for a while.

We have had Mark showing us round for the last few days which has been lovely. We made it through the extensive queues at Musee d’Orsay (though they are miniscule compared to the Louvre) to wander through this huge and beautiful, airy and bright space. H and I were tired but the gentle radiance of the place brightened us up. We saw several Van Gogh, and 'Gaughan in Polynesie' and other post-impressionists.

The Eiffel Tower is astonishing closeup, so big and so much like a massive Meccano construction.  We picked our way through mega, mega queues, tricksters with pretend petitions, and girls with gold rings just found by chance and needing a small € contribution, and wandered the Champ de Mars, a vast green space in front of the  Eiffel Tower, yet another restful garden.  Paris is gardens, flowers, greenery: even in the meanest of areas you can turn a corner to come upon a leafy idyll, with roses, jasmine, neat paths and seats – though the grass is often INTERDIT!!  

Abandoning the Eiffel Tower we followed Steven and Grace King’s advice (for the second time – they suggested the Musee d’Orsay was a better bet than the Louvre, vis à vis the art as well as ease of access), and took off for the Tour Montparnasse, a two hundred metre office block – one of the few big tower blocks in Paris. We shot quickly to the top in a very crowded lift to see a panorama of Paris that included the Eiffel Tower. We had lots of fun up there for 45 minutes with just a little vertigo while Mark competed with all-comers on the length of his long lens.

Views from on top of Tour Montparnasse

H fighting vertigo.

Mark and his long lens.

One of several memorials to French Resistance fighters spotted around town.
This one with recent bouquet.

Cows might fly… H in a park near our canal-side home.