July 17 – Angelina’s Chocolate and the Louvre Museum

We skipped breakfast at the hotel today and headed straight for Angelina’s hoping that we would beat the crowd.  We were there by about 9:00 in the morning and there was only a small line out the door.  So our wait wasn’t too long.

We all had French Toast and Angelina’s hot chocolate and Liam got a “tea” tray that had croissants and jams and such.  And we even had desserts for breakfast.  Great Food!!

And we were so happy to find out that they now had the hot chocolate mix available for sale. With Charlie a few weeks earlier a translation/communication problem occurred so we thought they no longer sold them.  We believe they meant they were out that day.  So we bought six boxes of the awesome stuff.  Now we just need to figure out how to get and additional 8 pounds into our already stuffed luggage.

We killed some time at the hotel and then headed out in the afternoon to the Louvre...

for our “Murders and Mysteries of the Louvre” tour.  Liam had requested this tour as it peaked his 12 year old’s interest.  However, the topic was a bit of a stretch…but the tour was good.  Liam isn’t all that interested in art but he was a trouper and hung in there fore the entire tour. 

We saw lots of statues,

the two princes in the tower (King Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, who were sent to the Tower of London and then killed by their Uncle, Richard III – one of the “murder” topics of the tour),

the Winged Victory,

the Venus de Milo,

Artemis (The Diana of Versailles),

and joined the mob at the Mona Lisa.

More Louvre photos.

The tour ended down underground where we saw drawing of the original footprints of the Louvre when it was a fortification and then a palace.  We walked along what was originally the moat and saw some of the original walls and the lower part of some of the towers.  Very interesting. 

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More Paris
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At this point Liam was done and we spent the rest of the day at the hotel, going out only for some dinner.