My Shutter Finger is Tired

One last day of Paris photos... and we took a lot of them.

On Friday, we crammed a LOT in:
A morning revisit to the Louvre...




...an ascent of the bell towers of Notre Dame...





...and then a stroll through the church proper...



...a visit to the Crypte Archeologique under Notre Dame...


...a peek at the Conciergerie, an ancient prison...


...a wander along the Seine...



...and a visit to the Eiffel Tower (where, you'll notice, it rained, thereby rounding out our week such that the only day it didn't rain during our vacation was the day when we were too jet-lagged and incoherent to appreciate it)...






...but we did get a rainbow out of the deal.


And, c'est tout!

What's that? You're disappointed that there will be no more Paris photos? Yeah, me too. A little. Though a week of heavy-duty walking and exploring and seeing and absorbing and wrestling with an increasingly bulky wheelchair has effectively worn me out, and if we had stayed in Paris longer, I think the photos from yesterday would have involved a lot of naps and watching TV. You have to rest and refuel at some point, you know?

But instead of taking a day off in Paris, we came home. The flight was long - eight hours - and the landing was exciting, with potential smoke from the right engine and then getting towed to the actual gate, but we all survived intact so we're just going to pretend it was just mist from the New Jersey rain, okay?

Okay.

We were all heavily jet-lagged upon our return, enough to miss Route 24 in Jersey and to take the slightly longer way up - but that gave me the opportunity to call the lovely Lisa and warn her that we were in the neighborhood. She is the mother of a toddler and a newborn, so of course I would never be so sadistic as to pop in unannounced - it was bad enough for me to call during that 7:00-ish hour after dinner and before bedtime when chaos abounds, but she'll probably forgive me - but it was nice to be able to call and hear a familiar, non-French voice upon my return.

My mother and I stayed awake for the drive back to New York - which is particularly handy for her, seeing as how she was driving - and now I'm just finishing up with the copying and transferring of photos to her computer before I get on the road to head home for real. I have a few stops to make, so it'll take me a while... but I'll get hugs from my kids tonight.

I'm not quite done with this blog just yet - there will be film-photos, as yet to be developed, from the disposable and 35mm cameras that my mother and sisters brought with them. Once I get copies, I'll scan in a few and post.

In the meantime, I'll be over at my regularly scheduled blog. If you don't know its address, just drop me a quick line - kate2kids@gmail.com - and I'll happily share it.