Sept 8, 2022

Today was the King of all museum days. We got up pretty normally and I slept well, thanks to Trazodone and Ativan. Feel a lot more normal today. Got our usual amazing breakfast from our guy who treats us like family and then headed to the Metro for the Louvre. Easy Metro ride and our Louvre adventure begins. Nothing can prepare you for the enormity of the Louvre. It is HUGE. The artwork and antiquities go on forever. It is also extremely exhausting. We viewed artwork and antiquities for almost six hours with a break for coffee and a little snack. So many wonderful things to see and enjoy but the saturation point gets reached and you go numb. Fatigue and mental exhaustion take over and you can't care anymore. We wanted to see the Roman antiquities because it was important to Avi but we wandered in circles and finally found out that it was closed. We took our lumps and decided we'd had enough. More reframing and readjusting. We wandered out into the Tuileries Garden. This had to be the high point of my time in Paris. The day was beautiful and the Gardens are extraordinary. You can see the obelisk on one end of the garden and the Louvre on the other end. The Eiffel Tower looms in the background and the Seine River winds around all of it. So delightful. We headed through the Gardens and had one very humorous moment. Avi stopped to do squats in Avi fashion. All of the sudden he was surrounded by a group of people all wearing these funny bird turbans on their heads and they all started doing squats with him. Georgia had joined him so for the next five minutes this group of people laughing and talking in French did squats with Avi and Georgia. I just loved it. A true international experience. We headed from there to a late lunch/early dinner and ate at a quintessential French restaurant, outdoors and wonderful cuisine. Beautiful moments and the things that make travel wonderful. David really wanted to visit the Orsay Museum. We thought we were not going to be able to but discovered that the Orsay was open until 9:45 on Thursdays. So, we decided maybe we had enough gas to do it. We walked over, got tickets and began our trek. We all ran out of gas quickly but we managed to see the Impressionist Era paintings. We were all feeling sore and exhausted and decided that museum fatigue had taken over. Headed back to our room, sore and beat up but pretty happy with our day.