June 18, 2017. Sunday. It’s 11 pm here in Paris and I can still see the soft glow of the sunset outside our 6th floor window. The sun goes down so late here! Today was warm — mid ’80s or so, but not humid, and the nice breeze made it really pleasant in the shade. We walked 9 miles today (according to my phone health app), in addition to taking the metro and RER twice. Since it was a weekend, we decided to avoid museums and places with long lines. So…we headed to Moulin Rouge for a quick photos and a jaunt through the otherwise lovely red district (was on the way from our flat to Montmartre…). That led us to Montmartre to take in the view of the city from up high, step inside Sacré Coeur to hear some moving organ playing and singing during the mass, watch the street artists at Place du Tertre, and eat some fresh baguette sandwiches in a nearby park. We negotiated a reasonable rate to have a street artists draw the four kids together, since Jo has one of herself when she was in college, and she also has one of her parents — all from Paris.

From Montmartre we walked downhill to the east to a place none of us had been before — Cemitiére du Montmartre. Eden was keen on visiting the grave of a composer that her friend loves, and we were pleasantly surprised at the beauty of the grounds and the unique and lavish mausoleums (plus we got to see Degas’s grave as well).

After a metro ride, we were off to see the Notre Dame cathedral (although first we had a super strange encounter with the metro “police” who demanded to see our tickets, found Helena’s invalid and Harrison’s non-existent, and promptly charged us 70 Euros, even though I had replacement tickets to offer her for both kids! It was positively insane and left a really bad taste in our mouths for a bit. I’ve never been treated more rudely in a foreign city.) Notre Dame was a busy and beautiful as ever in the front, but Jo and I actually prefer to view it from the south side and slightly from the rear, along the river. When we were there in 1999, we took a pic from that vantage point that shows the flying buttresses nicely; this time we found a tree had grown up so much that most of them were obscured. Still, we recreated a picture from 1999 with the kids.

The Pantheon was the next stop, but only Eden, Helena, and I went inside to view some of the mausoleums of famous people in the crypt — Victor Hugo, Jean Jacques Rosseau, and Voltaire, among others. It is as impressive as I remember it from before. From the Pantheon it was just a short walk through the Sorbonne, the famous Parisian university that has roots back to the thirteenth century, to the Luxembourg Gardens, with its circular pond and fountain in front of the Senate House. The kids loved the little sailboats you can rent and suddenly were revived enough to run around the pond endless times to meet their little pirate sailboat on the other side.

We grabbed a nice Father’s Day sit down meal near our flat. All in all, a lovely day! We couldn’t keep enough water in our bottles, however — we may need a separate fund just for that. And Nutella crepes. And baguette sandwiches.

(Note: you can click on the pictures to enlarge them.)