Back in the US!

So, after a wonderful time in Paris with Kristen and a day in Loch Lomond with Kristen, I am back home. Paris was absolutely amazing. The Eiffel Tower, The Louvre, Moulin Rouge, Pantheon, The Opera, Luxembourg Garden, Notre Dame, Arc du Triumphe, Catacombs, etc. We did so much while in Paris, and Paris truly is a romantic place. We had several picnics in the gardens, which consisted of wine, fruit, chocolate, and bread. Was such a relaxing time in Paris. The Eiffel Tower was great and was even more amazing at night when the tower glowed with the thousands of lights that lined it. Aside from the thousands of people that nagged you for money, it was a great experience. The Louvre was amazing and seeing the Mona Lisa and the statue of Venus de Milo. It was so relaxing outside of the Louvre sitting next to the fountains and relaxing. We enjoyed the Louvre so much that we returned two more times after the first visit just to sit by the fountains and relax. However, before reaching the Louvre, we walked through the park for fresh sorbet. I had the best mango sorbet ever! The catacombs were eery and very disturbing. Apparently, in Paris, the cemeteries became full and there was no more room for new burial sites. So, to buffer this, the city exhumed all of the bodies in the cemeteries and moved them below ground in the catacombs. There were literally thousands of bones and skulls all stacked up on top of each other. There are a few photos that I took. The most disgusting part of the whole catacomb visit was that at the end of the 45 min walk, they would check your bags to make sure you didn't steal any bones. How disgusting is that? Why would you want to steal human bones? There were two skulls that the man had already confiscated from other tourists. Down right disgusting is my only comment about that. We went back to the Louvre after the catacombs and relaxed by the beautiful fountains that surround the triangular structure that is the main building.

We walked around a bit more and planned for our last day in Paris for the next day. We figured that we would do some more exploring and see the Pantheon and have a nice meal at a restaurant. We first sat down at this bar and had a beer each and enjoyed the sunshine. Directly across from this bar was a nice little quaint restaurant where we decided to have our nice meal. Since we were in Paris, I felt that I had to try Escargot. I ordered six of them and they came with a garlic-butter sauce, which was very good. However, once is enough for escargot (for me at least). I then had steak with a peppercorn sauce and Kristen had the leg of duck. She had brown onion soup, which we Americans call 'French Onion Soup'. We finished our meal and then decided to finish our romantic day by heading over to the Eiffel Tower and looking at it at night while drinking wine and eating crepes. We had our wine and crepes below the beautifully-lit tower and headed back home around 11pm. We set our alarms for 4am. We woke up at 4am and I happened to look at our receipt and had figured it out that we had an entire day left in Paris. We had it figured all wrong for when we were leaving. Oh well, it was quite exciting that we had an extra day. We ended up going to the Opera (where the original story for the Phantom of the Opera took place) and where several major classical music composers performed (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc.). We had delicious baguettes at this little shop that had desserts galore. The baguettes were delicious! It started raining quite hard, so we ate under the cover of a store's little awning and waited until the rain calmed down a bit. We then walked around a bit and went back to the Louvre and relaxed by the fountains one last time. We ended our trip and went back to our hotel and set our alarms for our "real" departure that was the next morning. We have about 1,500 pictures combined from this trip! I will upload some as soon as I can, when I have free time since it takes quite a while to upload photos.