Europe 2017 – Paris and London

We spent the first half of Day Seven in Paris. Top of our list was the Musée d’Orsay. The museum was a former railway station, inaugurated for the 1900 World Fair. It housed a luxurious hotel and grand reception room. Many of its original features have been maintained. In my opinion, the building itself rivals the artwork inside. Look how grand!

One of the main reasons for coming here was for Blinky to have her picture made with Monet’s painting The Water Lily Pond. I plan to have it framed next to her reproduction. #proudmama

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We made good use of our time and covered nearly the entire museum. I have always been a fan of Degas’ Little Dancer of Fourteen Years and finally got to see it in person!

Hang on, I got distracted by the view of Sacré-Cœur. (Have I ever written about traipsing around England and Paris while in college on a self-guided Da Vinci Code tour? Now that would be a funny post!)

The DH and I soaking it all in:

There was a featured exhibition of paintings featuring the night sky. I was thrilled to see several Van Gogh pieces. (He has always been one of my favorite artists which I wrote about briefly here.) This one was my favorite:

Notre-Dame de Paris

After wrapping up at the Museum, we zipped over to Notre-Dame de Paris. The cathedral is glorious, especially when the sun hits the rose windows.

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The plan was for us to visit the Arc de Triomphe next, but we needed to make sure we got to the train station on time. No matter, we saw it from the top of the Eiffel Tower before sunset and at night all lit up. We raced back to the hotel to grab our luggage and took a bus to Gare du Nord to take the Eurostar to London.

Eurostar

The Eurostar is a high speed train which connects London and Paris. The coolest feature for the kids was that part of the journey ran underneath the English Channel in the Channel Tunnel or Chunnel. The DH shared a memory of watching the news as a boy and seeing workers from both sides of the construction shaking hands when they finally met in the middle. He’s a keeper ladies. 😉

We arrived in London about 7pm in the evening and walked a block from the train station to our hotel, We were completely wiped out. The late hours the night before had caught up to all of us. We had a quick meal in the hotel restaurant and called it an early night. We had a long list of sights to visit on Day Eight and wanted to be well rested.

Little did we know, Mother Nature had other plans. It is London after all! Stay tuned.