Gottfried Travel Adventures

 April 11 Early and chilly morning start in a cab to Pont de L’Alba to meet our guide. Our guide Nev is Croatian and did an excellent job of leading us on the train to Versailles and showing us around the palace. We were for that the crowds were relatively light yet the weather was perfect!  We headed back to Paris to find our way to the Dior museum for our 3 o’clock tour. We had an hour to kill, so we stopped in to a posh hotel Athenee for a drink. The area around Dior Museum is nothing but decadence and big money!  The Dior museum was well done! Beautiful, timeless fashions!  We caught a cab outside the Dior museum back to our hotel. I spotted the Maille mustard shop that David requested I go to. There I bought some gifts for David.  From there, we walked to the hotel, stopping for some wine, flowers and vodka.  At 6, we met Hugo Torres, our friend from Amanda and Steven’s college years. He caught us up on his life - he’s engaged! And we caught him up on ...

 April 10 Today we met at the Louvre for a 3 hour tour. Our guide was good and took us to see many works of art including of course, the Mona Lisa, winged victory and Venus de Milo.  We wanted to see the couture history exhibit, so we dropped out of the tour. We went to a Louvre restaurant and had a great meal, but when we tried to go to the couture exhibition, we had to show proof of our entry, which we didn’t have. We think we’ll try again later this week. Instead we walked towards the Notre Dame to meet our next tour. There, our Argentinian guide told us the history of the cathedral and all about the restoration after the fire of April 2019.  After that tour, we walked toward our hotel and had a very nice dinner in the Marais at Au Chien oui Fume - I knew Chien meant dog so we gave it a try! It was a surprisingly wonderful meal and the art on the walls were all dogs in seemingly impressionist paintings.  This is a beautiful building we passed on our walk to the ho...

 April 9 What a day!! We started our day by walking to the first stop of the BigBus, the Paris hop on hop off bus. The circuit was 2 hours 15 minutes and we had a great seat on top with blue skies overhead.  We decided to stay on for the circuit plus a stop. This way we saw the whole city and then were dropped at the louvre stop. We stopped at a cafe and had a drink, some Foie Gras and onion soup.  We then walked 3 blocks to Vilmorin, a garden and seed store that Martha Stewart frequents when in Paris. We bought some seeds to cultivate and I bought a pair of garden gloves.  From there, we went to the Musee d’Orsay and toured the impressionist's gallery (Manet, Renoir, Monet, Lautrec, Gauguin, Van Gogh) and sculpted Rodin and many others.  We caught the BigBus outside and rode around the loop to the Eiffel Tower. We disembarked there and headed for the Seine River boat that came with our BigBus ticket. From 6-7, we tootled down the Seine and back under clear blue...