Paris, long museum visits

After an uneventful train ride to Paris (on which I did in fact manage to get some sleep), I managed to locate my hotel with the aid of a taxi, since I stupidly believed Orbitz that it was in the middle of Paris.

It was actually near the Montparnasse train station, which is not anywhere near the middle of Paris. Ah, travel lessons.

Once that was settled, I immediately headed to the Louvre, where I engaged in the exercise of determining how much time I could spend there, and how much of it I would see in that time.

The answers turned out to be 5.5 hours and about 1/4 of the collection respectively.

A lot of people get "museum legs" and/or "museum fatigue" after 2 or 3 hours in a museum. I usually do too, but I decided the Louvre was special. I ignored the museum legs (I've been tramping around Spain for how long?). When I got tired of any particular area, I simply moved on to something different, and thus avoided the fatigue of "oh, not another gallery of X". Since the Louvre has such an incredible diversity of materials, this was not hard to do. I ended up seeing a fair amount of French and Dutch paintings, French sculpture, objects from the French Middle Ages, and Levantine antiquities. I didn't see plenty of other things, including Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. I'm reasonably certain they'll still be there the next time I'm in Paris.

I saw the Louvre on Monday August 22. Tuesdays in Paris are bad news -- most museums are closed. However, one that was open was the Marmottan, which has a very nice collection of Monets.

While in Paris I also rediscovered the need for long pants, and the existence of droplets of moisture falling from the sky, things that had seemed remote while in Spain. (Well, it DID rain on occasion in Spain, but it was usually short-lived.)

I left Paris on a late-afternoon train for Mannheim, finally getting to my brother's abode in Ludwigshafen around 11:30 at night. Eric called a little while later to report that he and Claire were stuck in traffic in Switzerland -- this due to flooding. They arrived sometime in the wee hours.

I'm almost home, but there's one more piece of adventure left: I have to fly British Airways to get home.