Day 10

Our last day in Paris. We were sad to leave, but excited for the rest of our trip. On our last day we went to the Louvre museum. We just got a 2 hour glimpse at the massive collection. Of course we saw the Mona Lisa, although we did not get very close since there were so many people in the room. We also saw the French crown jewels, many Greek statues, paintings by Da Vinci, and many other beautiful paintings. And the building itself is beautiful to look at; it was the palace before the royalty moved to Versailles.
From the Louvre we walked to the Champs-Elysees and enjoyed doing some window shopping, there are even car dealerships! At the end of the Champs-Elysees is the Arc de Triomphe. We walked up to the top of the Arc and loved the views of Paris. (And added another 284 steps to our monument climbing, see the picture.) It was also fun to watch the cars in the massive roundabout below us.We left the Arc to walk to the Eiffel Tower. When we got to the tower we realized we would not be able to take the elevator up, since it was a 2 hour wait. So we got in the line for the stairs, which was still 30 min. long. (Here's another 700 stairs.) It was fun to be able to go up the stairs, we got to enjoy the view longer and now we get to say we have climbed up the three major monuments in Paris. :) The views were amazing. We also sent a postcard to Micah's work and to Kayla who was housesitting for us. They have a little postoffice on the first floor of the tower. While we were on the second floor we got seperated from Mom, Dad and Justin, but we had agreed to meet on the grass. It wasn't until we climbed down that we wondered what green grass they meant. We looked around the parks at the base of the tower and waited, but didn't find them so we got an ice cream cone and a crepe to eat while we waited. We didn't find them until we got to the hotel, and found out they had meant the fake green grass on the first floor of the tower, oh well.
For our last night in Paris we had a group dinner at Le Grand Coulbert. We enjoyed talking with the other members of our group and eating the wonderful food. The tour has been a lot of fun, and it has been nice to have a guide give us information on the places and things we were seeing. We had a great group and a wonderful guide. We hope we will get to go on another Rick Steves tour in the future.