The Next Place

We had a final wrap-up session with the choir and then it was time to say good-bye and head off in different directions.  The main part of the choir was flying back to the States together, but a few of us were doing other things.
I determined to get a bit of sleep, but the sudden transition left me unable to relax and sleep. Our small group left early the next morning (better stated as the middle of the night) for the train station.  Sometime after we arrived at the train station, we found out the station was closed the day before due to strikes/demonstrations by the ferry workers.  Tires had been burned on the train tracks.  I slept most of the 2 1/2 hours to Paris.  We arrived at 9:30.  I insisted on food for the first of many times so we started off with crepes.
The Bastille was our first stop.  We stopped for maybe a minute.  I'm not sure what we could have seen if we had looked around, but all we saw was the July Column marking the spot.

We did a lot of walking.  Really miles and miles of walking.  We continued to the Notre Dame where some of us went inside and others waited for a very long time to use the self cleaning bathrooms.

Then we continued to the Louvre, one of the biggest and most famous art museums.  Martha and I were the only ones who went in.  The others found other things to amuse themselves.  We waited in line for over an hour and then spent about 2 hours racing through the museum.  Of course we didn't see anywhere near all of the museum but we did see the Mona Lisa.

By the time we were done it was around 5:00 and the crepes had been digested many hours before and I was begging for food again.  We ate along the well-known street, Ave. des Champs Elysees, but we were too cheap to eat at any of the very expensive places and instead ate a French burger joint equivilent to McDonalds.  And no, I cannot pronounce the name of the street, nor many of the other places and streets we saw.  We laughed all day over our horrible pronunciations, but there was no time to find out the correct way to say them.

We tried to find a certain garden, but the gardens were closed.  We decided to go to a certain Metro station to catch a river cruise but somehow got the wrong train and ended up at the Eiffel Tower.  It turned out to be a good mistake, since the cruise we wanted started at the Eiffel Tower and not the other end.  The cruise was ok but we all agreed that it was the part of the busy day we should have skipped.
The Eiffel Tower.  Perhaps the lines were shorter by 9:00 in the evening than they were at midday, but they were longer than they were a few hours earlier.  I had no idea how many times you need to stand in line to go up and down the Eiffel Tower.

 This really is an accurate representation of how I felt at this point.  Walking all day on almost no sleep and hardly any food, was almost more than I could handle.

Around midnight we exited the Eiffel Tower.  One hour to get back before the Metro closed.  The next hour included a lot of running, climbing over the ticket turn stiles when my tickets disappeared, and dashing onto trains as the doors were closing.  We walked out of the station 4 minutes till 1.  Exhaustion!  And I'm out of time again so I'll finish the next time.