Ah, Paris. What an amazing weekend! As we are good at, we packed it in, but had a lot of fun, too. We arrived at 9:30 in the morning, dropped our bags at the hotel (located near the Opera House) had brunch at the Cafe Zephyr, andstarted our wandering in the general direction of the Louvre. After passing the Bourse (home of the French Stock Exchange) and the Bibliotheque Nationale (home of every book written in France since the 1500s), ourfirst stop was the Palais Royal. We walked through the gardens to the courtyard where there were 250 columns spread out all around. Most of them were short, but some of them got over 2 metres high! Of course, what else would you do except pose on them! We then continued onto to the Louvre. 
Of course we entered through the glass pyramid (which I think is very cool). Like every other tourist, our first stop was the Mona Lisa. We were actually pleasantly surprised at how small (relatively speaking) the crowds were. We had expected much worse. We continued our Louvre tour with viewings of Lady Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix, the Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory. Those are the ones I recognized. We also passed several hundred others! A tour guide told us that if you spent 3 seconds looking at each piece of art in the Louvre it would take you three months, 24 hours a day, to view them all!
On the way out of the Louvre we stopped beneath the inverted pyramid for a photo op.
On our way back toward the hotel we wandered through the Jardin des Tuileries and then over to the Seine. Everywhere we looked were beautiful old buildings. Just awesome!
Dinner that night was at the Select Haussmann Brasserie. The food was very good in spite of the floor show (see entry for Jacob)!! I would like to say we all collapsed into sleep that night, but the kids roomed with MaryAnn and, being an Aunt, she encouraged jumping on beds and throwing pillows! No damage done.
