Camera Crazy

As I sit on my unmade bed, in my jammies, on a Thursday morning afternoon, my Dad and his wife, Pam are flying back to North Dakota after a nearly 2-week visit. We resolved to "take it easy" and not try to do everything, including lots of stops to eat, drink and rest, and even a few "sleep in" days. Even so, we managed to cover a lot of ground.

We hit:

*Notre Dame de Paris (3 times! twice for a visit, once for Easter Mass)
*the crypt of Parvis (an archaeological dig of remains of Roman and medieval buildings beneath the ground of the area in front of the church)
*the treasury of Notre Dame (saw relics of the crown of thorns, true cross and holy nail)
*St. Michel fountain
*Quartier Latin
*the Louvre (we maybe saw a tenth of it, including [of course] the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory and the Emperor's apartments)
*Rue de Rivoli
*the Marais
*Sacré Coeur
*Moulin Rouge
*Arc de Triomphe
*Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
*Musée d'Orsay (Art from Impressionists and others of that time)
*Musée de Cluny (Medieval museum)
*St. Germain des Prés
*Montparnasse
*Quartier Latin
*Rue Mouffetard
*Place d'Italie
*Calais WW2 museum
*Calais beach
*Calais cathedral
*Calais medieval city wall
*Eurostar train, buses, RER train and lots of Métropolitain rides
*Eiffel Tower
*Montparnasse Tower
*Versailles
*Versailles Gardens
*Grand Trianon
*Petit Trianon
*and a picnic at the Jardin de Luxembourg
*(and many more, that I can't even remember right now!)

And of course, just about every kind of restaurant you can imagine. Dad is kind of a fussy eater (kind of?) but was able to find steak and fries most of the time, and his favorite was what he called "Humpty Dumpty". (He meant Hippopotamus, a chain of french family bar and grill type restaurants.)

My Dad is the world's best photo book creator, meaning he gets his prints made and in books within days of returning from a trip, with captions added. He kept waiting for a sunny day to really let loose with his Canon, but alas, this is Paris, and days with no clouds are rare, indeed. Even so, he managed to take over 300 photos while he was here. He rivals my Grandma Sylvia when it comes to the number of pictures he takes (everyone says she keeps Kodak in business), and I am afraid I am definitely my father's daughter, because I too (especially when he's around--competition, you know) take a lot of photos. I haven't gone in and culled many, but I've posted them all on my Flickr site for you to see. After finally making the leap to digital, he's realizing just how cool and easy photo taking and sharing can be, and he's promised to burn a CD of the photos he's got and mail them to me. I'll post some of those when I get them, but for now, there are about 150 for you to peruse. The captions are admittedly terrible, but they give you an idea of a few of the things we've been doing over the last 12 days.

And you just might find, if you look carefully, some photos that you might have wanted to see earlier. Hee hee!