Eilders in Italia: Paris

Paris, continued! On our second day, before the rain hit, we ducked into the Louvre museum and spent a few hours wandering around... We were so glad that we took advantage of audio guides provided by the museum. Using the guides was pretty inexpensive and they included navigation.. They were actually Nintendo 3DS's... Truth be told, we felt a little out of touch trying to navigate using the map feature, but in our defense, the Louvre is the world's largest museum and a bit overwhelming. And let's face it, we're getting old...

So the Nintendos were really pretty helpful to find our way around.. Neither of us is necessarily all that "into" art (I know... please don't cringe!), but we definitely didn't want to miss some of the more famous artwork so we chose one of the tours that highlighted the main masterpieces. It's true what they say - you could spend weeks in the Louvre. The next day, our bike tour guide actually told us that there are college students who spend entire semesters only studying works in the museum... and there are thousands of pieces in storage that aren't even on display!

Family-friendly Louvre fact: show up with a stroller and you get to skip the line! The helpful security staff led us straight to the fancy open-air elevator (see the tiny people on top of the silver pole) and down we went! It's the little things. :)

We attempted a second 'guided' tour of Egyptian artifacts and only made it a little ways in. Eva was done! We really enjoyed seeing the Louvre and getting to see the Mona Lisa in person, even if it did require elbowing our way through the crowd. Eva was pretty happy during most of our visit, but definitely let us know when she was ready to leave! Eventually, we found our way outside... for awhile we thought we'd never find the exit, and stopped at a sidewalk cafe for crepes. Delish!

The next morning we were scheduled for our bike tour with Bike About Tours, a company recommended by our new exchange-student friend, Rachel. We met her through my aunt, who knows Rachel's mom... Sidenote, she came to visit us last weekend - we had a fun, relaxing day showing her around Como. She has traveled more during her time as an exchange student than many people travel in their lifetime! Truly It's impressive! Read more about that here on Rachel's blog... Our experience with Bike About Tours was fantastic. We emailed ahead of time to schedule and they went above and beyond locating a child seat that was the right size for Eva... They even let me switch tour days because we checked the forecast and didn't really want to ride in the rain with our little one.