The Louvre

The Louvre was on the agenda for Friday but we waited until the afternoon because the museum is open late….and we needed a morning to rest!

Lines for the museum are always long but the Rick Steves book gave us some really good tips. The first waiting until the afternoon when the lines have died down on a night that it stays open late. They were about an hour when we arrived at about 12:45, whereas in the morning it would have been more like about 3 hours. The second tip was to go to a certain entrance (I’ll tell you if you are going to visit Paris) and find the tabac shop and purchase the tickets there…..well we found the entrance, found the shop and we were inside the museum within 10 minutes of passing the outside line in search of the the entrance!

The Louvre is an amazing building and an amazing collection of works. The paintings and the sculptures are displayed so perfectly…..there is so much room to look and wander in the maze of massive corridors and rooms. We saw the Mona Lisa, the statue of Venus de Milo, Hammurabi’s Code. We spent about 5 hours wandering and we only saw a fraction of the collection and the museum. When we come back……..

Besides the score of the no line to get into the museum, we also found a washroom hidden with NO lineup!….the other ones we found had about 20 women in line at each one, no lineups at the men’s of course. This is a big bonus because in a building of this size with this many people coming there is maybe 6 washrooms with 2-3 stalls each!

This really being the last day in Paris we decided to go out for a really nice dinner. Sheryl and Paul’s neighbour Linda (the people I puppy sit for) gave us the name of a restaurant that we should go to. So off we go on underground into the metro then up walking….we were way off in finding it….finally an hour later we found, Restaurant Robert & Louise. A great supper of steak made over an open fire and a conversation with a couple of young Danish families.

Then off to the train home.


PS I am doing this entry 3 days later and have a couple of more pictures to upload to the site, but the computer at this hotel is not cooperating so I will add them later.