My legs felt like cooked noodles… we had been all up in that Eiffel Tower and all around it too, tramped through and around Notre Dame and St. Chapelle, and then blitzkrieged Sacre Coeur and Montmartre… but there was one more dream on Mollie’s Paris wish list…
No… not the Arch de Triumph… although that is an adorable picture of me and my mom…
And the arch is impressive…
But she is a 16-year-old girl… so it is what the arch resides over that drew her like a moth to flame…
Yes, it’s the Champs Elysees, arguably the most famous high-end shopping district on the planet.
It is also really long… and really crowded… and it was still hot even as the sun began to drift towards the edge of the world… and, because it gets dark so late in Europe in the summer, it had been a really long day…
But when your kid has a dream, you do what you gotta do… and besides that, our other daughter had put in a request for a certain shade of Chanel nail polish… which I am fairly certain you can get in the United States… but then you can’t tell people it was from Paris… so… yeah…
…more walking…
As an historical… and perhaps hysterical… note of interest… the central boulevards of Paris are laid out wide and straight for a reason. I think it was Napoleon III who began the process, and it wasn’t just for looks. He wanted his soldiers to be able to move around quickly to quell any rebellion by the populace… you know how the French like their rebellions… and so that his cannons could line up and fire grape shot to sweep the streets quickly of those pesky, revolting commoners. Now that is some civic planning.
Uh… if I had known we could rent those, I wouldn’t have done so much walking that day, dang it!
I think that says; “I am your father”…
My feet, by this time, felt like cooked sausages that were swelling to the point that they were about to burst out of their skin…
But even my mom was getting in on the act…
No, that isn’t a Parisian getting an early and overly-enthusiastic start on the wine tasting… or a lady having a seizure… that is a gypsy beggar. The funny thing… if this is indeed a thing that is at all funny… is that every single block on this long boulevard, and on many other streets in Paris as well, had a gypsy beggar woman in the exact same position on the ground… all clutching their little cups full of change. I mean, some of them were better at it than others. You could really feel the waves of despair emanating off of some of them. Others seemed to have fallen asleep in the warm sun. I could do a whole post on the Gypsy situation in Europe… the kids that beg in the train stations… and so on… but that is what Google… and travel… is for… to learn stuff.
At long last we were done with our epic adventure, and had taken a taxi back to this little neighborhood near out hotel where we ended up poking into the cheese shops, butcher shops and bakeries and getting the big boxes full of pastries, all of which I showed in an earlier post. It was a glorious day, but Europe really did kick my ass… and the next morning we were leaving for Germany… but I do have a few random pictures of Paris to share before then.
There I am, sitting on a train bound for Germany. I like trains.
This is me when I realized how fast we were going…
We all know I suck at math… and Americans can’t do the metric system… but isn’t that like 200 miles an hour?
We rented a car in Frankfurt, and then spent most of the day driving through places that looked like that.
We saw a lot of happy German cows.
And we ended up here… Rothenburg… a medieval walled town. And yes, I have been here before with my other daughter. She played with a bunch of other musicians in this very square about ten years ago. Only it wasn’t raining then.
Because Rothenburg really is the most charming town you could ever find.
And there is the Italian restaurant we ended up having dinner in… after we did the Night Watchman’s tour… which you should Google… in the cold and rain… the night before I took that picture…
That is what I looked like the night before, after wearing a wet hat in the rain for a few hours. My daughter took that picture right after I took my hat off. They were all laughing at me… my kid, my wife, my mom… sigh.
We were planning to eat German food. Because that is what you do in Germany. But by the time we were all settled in and then did the tour of the town, and were sopping wet and freezing cold, this place, close to hotel, seemed nice. And it was awesome. We talked to the owner about Italy for quite a while, and the food was superb.
