City of Light...

We hung around Disney Studios until it closed and then headed to Paris. The clouds on the horizon were pink and orange, creating shafts of light from the setting sun. It seemed auspicious to me, although we caught a lot of traffic heading into Paris and then had to suffer through one of Poposuda's (navigation system) breakdowns. Paris put her into a tailspin that wasn't easy to recover from.

Thanks to a mistake by our travel agent with our original reservation, we stayed in a pretty swank joint just off the Champs-Élysée; not a bad neighborhood if you (or your travel agent!) can afford it. We parked the land yacht a few hundred meters away for 26 Euros a day; not cheap, but we were in Paris after all. We ended up on the first floor in two rooms connected by a hallway with a private door. We had a surprising amount of space where the kids could and did run amok.I then headed out with Marina. We walked about 10 minutes to the Arc de Triomphe and decided to go up. It took more energy than we planned and was a bit windy, but the view of Paris, especially the Eiffel tower, was well worth it.

As you'll see, I'm kind of on an "over the head 180°" panorama kick. I took the one below of the arch before the gendarmes reminded me that tripods are verboten. This is the best example of this style I could muster on this trip. The arch closed at 23:00, pretty soon after we arrived. To avoid being too torn up the next day, we decided to head back to the hotel to get some much needed rest.