Last Moments in Paris

Due to the rain, instead of spending our last hours touring the gardens of Versailles, we took the train back to central Paris and walked up and down the Champs-Élysées. The street has a lot of the typical chain stores (sephora, the gap, etc.), as well as the high end flagship stores (Louis Vuitton, Mont Blanc, etc.). I was surprised by how many people were inside the Louis Vuitton store actually purchasing the bags that cost tens of thousands of dollars. At least the buyers were getting free glasses of champagne while spending so much on their bags!

Champs-Elysees

At the top of Champs-Élysées is the Arc de Triomphe. It is so much larger than I had anticipated. If you've never been, look closely at the dots at the top of the arc - those are people's heads. And that white bus on the right-hand side of the photo? That's a double-decker bus. 

Arc de Triomphe

As you can tell, the sky was dry as we walked up to the Arc, but it was threatening more rain at any second. When we walked back down the Champs-Élysées, the sky opened back up and we had to duck into a store for ten minutes as the umbrella wasn't even cutting it. 

Arc de Triomphe

After doing a bit of window shopping, we walked back over to our hotel's neighborhood in search of dinner. We found a small cafe whose menu out front was both in English and French. Once seated, we realized this restaurant really catered to the tourists, and Bill and I prefer to find places where the actual residents would eat. Nevertheless, we had been seated, so we decided to take them up on being tourists, and ordered the snails and bone marrow as our evenings' meal. Yeah, bone marrow? Kinda fatty and gross. Well, perhaps it would be good if we had been at a better restaurant, but I am not willing to order that again. Snails are okay... it's basically just a delivery system for butter and garlic, in my opinion! 

After our small, but caloric meal, we paid and went in search of a friendly, quaint bistro. We found a terrific place just down the road and spent several hours people watching and wine drinking on their heated outdoor seating veranda. Fabulous end to an amazing trip - J'aime Paris!!

Bone marrow and snails...