Day 3 - Luxembourg Palace and Gardens

After our morning at the Notre Dame towers and the Pantheon, we hit the streets of Paris again. I love wandering through them with David!

David's lunch choice - a lamb gyro, with the meat scraped right off the bone!

Our spot to eat lunch - the Luxembourg Garden.

We sat on the lawn and started eating our delicious food. (This picture was taken moments before a policeman came over and told us we couldn't eat on the grass.)

The beautiful Luxembourg Palace, built during the 1600's to be the royal residence of the regent Marie de' Medici, widow of Henry IV and mother of Louis XIII of France. Over the years it became a museum, briefly a prison, and in 1799 the first residence of Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul of the French Republic. Just after WWII, the palace was the site of the talks of the Paris Peace Conference and since 1958 it has been the seat of the French Senate of the Fifth Republic.

We were both so worn out by this point that we decided to do what many others were doing at the gardens - relax and take a nap.  We were lucky enough to grab this bench because the place was packed!

David can sleep anywhere so I think he got some zzz's in; I, on the other hand, was on the verge of sleep until Chatty Cathy pulled up a sit right by us and spent the next half hour talking loudly on her phone. Ugh! I also got a huge kick out of watching some guy come up to her and ask her where she got her McDonalds.  For whatever reason, these French people LOVE McDonalds! All the ones we've seen have been packed!

It was an absolutely gorgeous day so I couldn't be that upset! My view from the bench.

After resting, we decided to wander the gardens. The Garden is around 56 acres and is known for its lawns, tree-lined promenades, flowerbeds, and model sailboats on its circular basin. David and I strolled hand in hand and took it all in.

The garden contains just over a hundred statues, monuments, and fountains, scattered throughout the grounds. Surrounding the central green space are twenty figures of French queen and illustrious women standing on pedestals.

We loved how peaceful and calm it was here, even with tons of people roaming around.

We came across a bunch of men and women playing some kind of throwing game.

I loved how this guy kept playing even while smoking a cigar!

The first model of the Statue of Liberty by Frederic Bartholdi, 1870.

The pool and palace.

One last selfie before heading on our way.

Another glimpse of the Sorbonne as we headed to our next stop.

I was so excited for our brief stop at the Place de la Bastille, a square in Paris where the Bastille prison once stood. The "Storming of the Bastille" and its physical destruction took place between July 14, 1789 and July 14, 1790 during the French Revolution. No vestige of the prison remains.

The July Column which commemorates the events of the "three glorious" days of July 27-29, 1830 that saw the fall of King Charles X of France and the commencement of the "July Monarchy" of Louis-Philippe, King of the French, stands at the center of the square.

The column is 154 ft high and is engraved in gold with the names of those who died during the July 1830 Revolution. At the top is a gilded globe on which stands a colossal gilded figure, the "Spirit of Freedom". This star-crowned nude is perched on one foot and brandishes the torch of civilization and the remains of his broken chains.

Our next stop of the day was David's pick - the Palais Garnier, a 1,979-seat opera house built from 1861 to 1875 for the Paris Opera. It has been called "probably the most famous opera house in the world, a symbol of Paris like Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, or the Sacre Coeur Basilica." This might be due to its use as the setting for The Phantom of the Opera.

The Palais Garnier is a building of exceptional opulence! The decorative elements include very elaborate multicolored marble friezes, columns, and lavish statuary, many of which portray deities of Greek mythology. Pictured here is one of the two gilded figural groups that crown the apexes of the principal facade's left and right avant-corps; it is made of gilt copper electrotype.

Gilded bronze busts of many of the great composers are located between the columns of the theater's front facade.

One of four major multi-figure groups - this one represents Lyrical Drama.

This figure represents The Idyll.

We hurried to the entrance to hit the last tour of the day which was at 4:30 but, even though we had five minutes to spare, they turned us away.   David was extremely disappointed and I don't blame him. Looks like this will be one of the places we catch on our next trip to France. So, we spent a little more time checking out the beautiful exterior of the building and taking lots of pictures.

It was about this time that I told David to get in touch with the Crowes to see what they wanted to do about dinner. Also around this time David decided he wanted to find a pastry shop. The search began and I slowly started to fall apart. My feet were so sore, I was tired and hungry and had to use the bathroom, and David just kept walking all over the place trying to find this one particular shop that he had pulled up on some map app. After we ended up in this massive tourist shopping gallery surrounded by a gazillion tourists from a certain part of the world that are extremely rude and pushy, I was so miserable that I might have had a tiny bit of a meltdown. The only bright spot of our futile wandering was this beautiful church, La Madeleine. It was designed in its present form as a temple to the glory of Napoleon's army.

The pediment sculpture is of the Last Judgement.

We finally met up with the Crowes. Problems at home with the kids were leaving them stressed and not sleeping well so they had spent most of their day catching up on their sleep. As Josh made his way over to us, he thought it would be fun to recreate a "running through pigeons causing them to fly off" scene that one often sees in movies. However, the pigeons decided to stay put.

We chose to eat at a restaurant close to the Arch de Triomphe and it turned out to be one of my favorite meals (a delicious warm goat's cheese and honey with toasted bread salad) although our waiter was a tad on the rude side. He was young and didn't like that David was speaking French to him. He kept saying in a very condescending tone, "I understand English!"

He also got very mad when we dared to pour our water in the wine glasses. He actually shook his head at us and stormed off.

After a laugh-filled dinner, we headed down to the Seine to catch our river cruise. We passed the Hotel de Ville on our way, catching some different views of this amazing building.

Loved the lions!

And some beautiful views of Notre Dame in the evening. The lighting was gorgeous!

Saint Denis was the first bishop of Paris in the third century but he got on the bad side of the local pagan priests to the Roman rulers of Paris had him arrested and executed by beheading. It's said that immediately after Denis was killed, he picked up his head and walked over 3 miles to the North and finally died. Yep, that's his statue, the guy holding his head.

For the second time that day, we just barely missed a tour. Dang it! But we did get a nice picture of me and Lenae!

I LOVE this picture of me and David, especially because every time I look at it it makes me laugh. Both Josh and I had posted on Facebook how we were headed to Paris and one of our mutual friends in Maryland commented on each of our individual posts that we should hook up with each other while we were in Paris, not realizing that we were going together. Josh replied to her comment, "Oh, no! The Pierces are in Paris? They're one of the reasons we left Maryland." After hearing that he had said this, I made my own comment to her in the same vein, mentioning that Paris is a big city and the chances of running into them were slim, thank goodness. So then we decided to take it one step further and take a picture of me and David with Josh in the background and then post it to Joyce, saying we were enjoying Paris but hadn't seen the Crowes. This was the picture that we posted and the funny thing was Joyce didn't even notice Josh standing behind us. We thought we were pretty funny.

Since we had missed the river cruise, we decided to just stop and get some yummy dessert at a little sidewalk  cafe.

This picture pretty much sums up how the trip was going between these two...lots of jokes and fun from Josh and David a little on the less patient side.

He's all smiles for dessert, though.

Our final group selfie of the day. It was another good one!