The Louvre

There are about 35.000 objects on display on at the Louvre, and walking through it, you feel like you see most of them just by turning your head. There are paintings and sculptures everywhere, tucked into every corner. We saw the "Big Three" first, of course: the Mona Lisa, the Winged Vistory, and the Venus de Milo.

But the rest of the collection is astonishing too, and quite far-reaching. It includes things like the original Code of Hammurabi:

and even an Easter Island statue (the one that isn't Avery).

Even the buildings and grounds are beautiful.

All in all, an amazing place to visit.

Notre Dame

We started the day as good tourists, with a trip to Notre Dame.

Of course, Notre Dame is famous for its magnificent stained glass windows. For some reason, this is the window that caught Jon's eye:

The cathedral is equally famous for its gargoyles, which were originally created as rainspouts to help with water runoff. They are all over the building, and some are pretty freaky looking. However, we happened to overhear a tour guide who pointed out the most famous gargoyle of all, squatting alone on the side of the church, so infamous that stories, books, musicals and even a Disney movie have been made about him.

Yes, that's Quasimodo. Pretty cool, n'est-ce pas? You can climb to the top of the cathedral and walk among the bells and the bigger gargoyles, but it's 400 steps up and my feet refused. So we went down into the crypts instead, to see the Gaul and  Roman ruins. But that's for tomorrow's blog. Bonne nuit!

Bonjour!

Greetings from the City of Lights! We arrived on Thursday, having lost one night in traveling, but tried to make up for it with a nap and some evening sight-seeing.

The city is full of people, locals and tourists, all moving fast and staying out late. We are staying in the 14th arrondissement, the Montparnasse, full of little shops and cafes, with a very different feel to it than some of the big districts with huge boulevards (some which we saw Friday). So far, an excellent, if tiring, start to our trip.

We are back on the blog!

Following a short hiatus, the Garon Family Travel Blog is back online (hey, what's three years among friends?). This will be our first major trip abroad since going to Israel in 2009, so we felt it deserved more than a few hurried Facebook entries, and thus we decided to resurrect the ol' blog in time for our trip to Paris.

As it turns out, however, our trip to Las Vegas last week was so successful that we don't need to go to Paris at all! Apparently everything one needs is actually available in Vegas itself -- including Paris, Italy, New York -- so one does not need to go anywhere else, not even outside. So not only did we see the Eiffel Tower and the  Champs-Elysées already, we even discovered that the Arc De Triomphe has Gordon Ramsay's face on it! So who needs to go to the real Paris? But I think we will anyway. So watch this space for exciting, whimsical and witty entries about all the exciting, whimsical and witty things that Jon, Avery and I will be doing in the City of Lights. (Noah, of course, is still in the exciting City of Eagle River, WI for the summer.) So until then, à bientôt !