The Berridges: Last Day in Paris

{Sorry it's taken so long to post the last full day of our European trip... we are yet again out of town!}

July 13

Today was our last day in Paris, so we made the most of it! Our first stop was the Louvre where we saw untold millions of dollars (euros) worth of paintings and sculptures. At this point in our vacation, we were so tired that we ended up just doing the touristy stuff at the Louvre - Mona Lisa, Venus di Milo, Napoleon's Coronation painting, the crown jewels of one of the Louis's... you know, the usual. The only other art that we got to see was the art between Point A and Point B. I almost felt bad that of all of the other priceless pieces of art at this museum, only a handful of pieces get the most attention.

I found interesting (possibly even more so than the art) was the museum building itself. It was the former palace to King Louis XIV before he moved everything and everyone in it to Versailles. The buildings that housed these precious works of art was, in my estimation, the overlooked crown jewel of the entire museum. I was unable to find very much history on it, but it was fantastic!

One thing that you always hear about the Louvre is the sheer size of it... I will tell you that it is so large that there is no way you would be able to see everything there is to see in several days' time, much less one day... or as in our case, a couple of hours. Our "tour guide" Rick Steves (http://www.ricksteves.com/) said in his book on Paris that you could spend all day every day for several weeks and still not see everything there is to see at the Louvre. After spending a few hours there, we barely scratched the surface!

We then headed over to St. Chappelle Chapel. This chapel is famous for the unbelievable stained glass. As most stained glass does in any church, this stained glass depicts biblical stories. What makes this most interesting is that this little chapel (it is quite a bit smaller than the cathedrals we have been seeing) chronicles some 1,000 Bible stories. We were unable to shoot any good pictures of the inside of this chapel, but it was absolutely breathtaking. It's worth making a little detour to see.

Our original plan from this point was to head over to the Orsay Museum, but Beth and I had agreed that we were pretty much museum-ed out... we were totally exhausted. The last thing we needed was some soothing Impressionistic Art.... I'm sure we would have fallen asleep standing up! We instead decided to go over to a little lesser known attraction - one of the original Statues of Liberty. A rough draft, if you will, to ours in the US. We got the idea to go by watching National Treasure II in the airplane on the way over. This statue is significantly smaller than our Statue of Liberty that sits in New York Harbor. This instead sits on an island in the Seine River facing east, and BTW - it is nowhere near as busy as it is depicted in the movie. In fact, we and only one other American family were the only people even there. Still, it was good to see.

From that point, we hopped back on the train to Dustin and Amanda's house in The Netherlands, as we fly home tomorrow from Amsterdam. We are indebted to them for their gracious hospitality and opening their home to us. They not only made our trip less expensive by giving us free room and board for several nights, but they were superb tour guides while taking us on our daily excursions to Belgium, Germany, and touring The Netherlands... sights that they have seen many times over! We thank them dearly from the bottom of our hearts, and hope that someday soon we can return the favor!

We hope you have enjoyed reading about our journeys as much as we have enjoyed chronicling them for you! Keep checking back to see what we are up to!

Brett and Beth