21 May - Beaune to Paris

It was a nice cool morning for departure and we arrived after just a few hours in the coach and one restroom/snack break.  In route to Paris we passed a Trafallgra bus tour.  Same size coach as ours but completely packed with people!  On our coach there are at least 2 seats for every person!  This really has been a wonderful trip for us.  Upon our arrival in Paris we actually had a bit of a city tour from our coach, an  orientation of sorts.  Here was our first peek at the Eiffel Tower as we entered the city.  There is no city like PARIS!  Apparently there was not the usual amount of traffic so this made it possible to drive by several sites.  Rolinka has commented several times that she is surprised about the lack of crowds and we can only guess it is the economy.  She said the Rick Steves tours are down 40 percent, which is a pretty significant amount too.  We arrived very close to our hotel and bid Rene farewell.  We had free time for lunch and then met at 15:00 to begin our afternoon site seeing.  First we went on the Metro to be sure everyone understood the lesson we had on the coach in route to Paris.  It is logical and quite easy to understand with a few basic instructions.  Then we walked through the Latin  Quarter and saw a few historical sites before heading to Sainte Chappelle.  This is a lovely chapel that some king (sorry I forgot his name by now) had built.  The stained glass is magnificent and tells a complete story of the Bible I think.  From there it was a short walk to Notre Dame Cathedral.  Though I have seen this from the outside before we were unable to go inside last time I was here, it is breathtaking.  The facility holds 7K people!  The first stone was laid in 1163 and took just 150 years to build, this is actually pretty fast for a Cathedral.  During the Revolution the French thought the Kings across the front of the Cathedral repre3sented the French Kings so they destroyed them, not knowing they were the Kings of the Bible they were destroyed and crashed to the ground.  In the 1970's someone gardening found the original and damaged heads of the Kings and they are now displayed in a nearby Medieval Museum.  Isn't that amazing.  It is said 7 million people visit Notre Dame each year and 1 million of those are Americans.  I wonder if this will be true for 2009?  This is where our tours for the afternoon ended and we have free time now and John and I entered the Notre Dame and spent more than an hour looking all around and listening to part of a mass in French.  From there we walked around a bit an noted that Notre Dame is quite lovely from the sides and back too, though the front is what we see photographed all the time.  We took the Metro back to the Rue Cler area where we are staying and had a delicious dinner once again.  We were going to stay out until 10pm to see the Eiffel Tower twinkle but we are tired and we shall save this for tomorrow night.  It is hard to believe this tour portion will be over in just 2 more days!