April 23
Okay, so here we are at 6:30pm sitting in the laundromat doing a load of clothes. Not sure why the cycle is so freaking long but it’s going to take 56 minutes to wash one load of clothes. Then who knows how long to dry. (Postscript….only 20 minutes; yeah!) We’re going to be here all night. (No, we weren’t just until about 8pm) That’s why Lynn brought the computer and is writing this in Word. Then when we get home all she has to do is copy/paste into the website and upload pictures. Hopefully it will be earlier than midnight when she gets to bed. (Finished blog by 9:20 but had break for dinner.)
Today our main stop was the Louvre. Lynn has been having some right hip problems; stabbing pains that literally take her leg out from under her. Since Peter was afraid he was going to have to pick her up off the floor before we finished touring the museum, we got a wheelchair. For those of you who haven’t visited the Louvre, the building is a giant U shape. One of the long axis is the Denon wing and the other is the Richelieu. Virtually everyone heads straight for the Denon wing as that’s where the Italian works, including the Mona Lisa, are housed. As a result, the salons were crazy crowded. Everyone is busy looking either at their phones or the paintings (but mostly their phones), so it was very difficult for Peter to navigate through the crowded rooms. Normally we spend a great deal of time getting up close and personal with the paintings but today we could hardly get near them. The one benefit of the wheelchair, though, was that we didn’t have to navigate the scrum of over a hundred people trying to see the Mona Lisa. The first time Lynn was saw it in 1998, it was hanging on the wall like every other paining, and you could literally walk right up to it. When she brought mom in 2006, it was in its new place behind a glass wall and a barricade. No one can get within 20 feet of it. Then if you’re in the back of the scrum, you can’t even see it let alone study it. Since we had the wheelchair, we went to a special section in front of the scrum. We wheeled in front of everyone and stopped right in front of the painting. We were still 15 feet away and separated by a glass partition, but we got a lot closer than anyone else. Of course, Peter was feeling very conspicuous, so Lynn had to hurry to take a picture before he wheeled her away. We were there about 30 seconds.
Here are a few other things we saw in the Denon Wing.
After that we headed to the Richelieu wing to see the northern European paintings and were happy to see that it was virtually empty. There were also no rope barricades, so we get right up to the paintings. Here we saw more of the Dutch masters we loved so much in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Compared to these amazing works, the Italian paintings look very flat and one dimensional. The Dutch Masters are definitely our favorites.
After a bite to eat for lunch, we decided to get back on the Big Bus and visit Napoleon’s Tomb. There is also a museum there that Peter wants to visit. Once we realized that it would be almost 5pm before we got there and it closes at 6pm, we decided to save that for tomorrow. Instead, we got off at the Arc de Triumphe and went to the top of the monument. It was a clear day (but 20 degrees cooler than the weekend) so we had a very nice view from the top. Since we had only gotten to the Eiffel Tower on the Big Bus, we didn’t realize how close it is to the Arc de Triumphe.
Tomorrow we’re going to one more art museum, the Musee d’Orsay, to see the work of the French Impressionists. Lynn has never been there so it will be fun for her to see something different. Hopefully we can do it without the wheelchair. We’ll see how the leg is in the morning. Let you know how it goes. Night everyone.