The farther I am away from the trip, the more I am loving the trip.
I have to include the real pictures from this trip, when we're sitting on a bench sweating, or desperate for a bathroom. That was the actual trip. The seeing stuff was like, lucky. The rest was like camping. You're so dirty, you don't have your car, you don't have your kitchen, except instead of the forest it's like hordes of people all around you and you have to watch your wallet. It is alot, for a person who thrives in quiet, but who likes an adventure. Adventure is alot of work. She learned. Also to see alot, as much as you can in a beautiful place, with a tiny amount of time, and small cash situation, bonus added tricky stress. We got good at walking, at mapping each new city, especially as the trip narrowed to just me, Eve and Nathan. But we were exhausted. Our wonder meters had hit maximum. We started dreaming of the 405 freeway, regular ugly buildings, and Costco.
I already wrote about Versailles, but I'll do the travelogue version since my two readers seem to enjoy the lack of scope my writing takes during these blabfests about traveling with morons. Also it isn't that they're morons. I know these few certain people very well, years of immersion, so add that to 24 hour a day guerilla mode in a weird place, and turns out that makes anger. Like mixing blue and red and getting purple. Surprising, and not a bad color.
We leave our luggage in our cute hotel baggage room, hoping that we can still leave the country later since our passports are inside. Nathan has eaten about half of the teeny mints in the huge column container of mints on the hotel reception bar. I know out of all things in Paris, he will miss these foily mints the most.
Nathan and I get a quick game of ping pong in the hot little glassed in storefront they turned into a ping pong room off the hotel courtyard, just to say we did it, while also eating baguette and jelly because we can't not eat that every fucking day happily.
I think we uber to the Louvre no we take the bus and it drops us off in front of the place. Louis the 14th was not a looker but he must've been in incredible shape because if he just walked HALF his castle that is now the Louvre, ONCE a day, there is no marathon that could touch him.
We had specific things to see at the Louvre, the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, and Venus De Milo.
Let me just say that Emma, Bess and I achieved these three things. The Louvre is built on top of the three layers of hell, and we visited them all, descending into hotter and badder realms, looking for a bathroom. We literally dripped sweat in front of Venus de Milo, which was embarrassing to her, but she held her gaze majestically so as not to embarrass us. You can always count on a great work of marble to protect your feelings. And also stand generously motionless for a good picture. We saw the Winged Victory which was missing most of itself (just her head) but the wings were cool and it's in the middle of a staircase where most of the world seems to be moving up and down also looking for the bathroom. We did see Barry and Nathan here, they were on the balcony with the wheelchair above, and they waved as King Louis once did, to his servants to dust a little higher on the wings and achieve a Dustless Victory.
After Venus, who is in an antechamber near Satan's secret jacuzzi, from the feel of the heat radiating from everywhere, we were following a map to the bathroom and we dodged in and out of statues and paintings (Bess was so happy we were in MOTION near any of this art, and fast motion too) and we got to a back wall that ended, there was no bathroom, not even a secret bathroom even though the map clearly says so Evie looks at me ragey like I can't so this if the map is wrong and I take over, turn us around, we are on a mission now, and it says one floor down so we go down and end up near the Sphinx and I'm pretty sure King Tut will allow us to be buried here with him, but we dash through Ancient Egypt which also has NO BATHROOM. Why did Louis not plan very well, he must've needed to drop a deuce down here even kings have to take a wiz randomly
Emma finally finds the place, it looks like a doll's elevator and someone left the sauna on in all of France and the generator for that sauna is this bathroom. I fill up our water bottle with hot water, good for the pores, and I use the bathroom too because god knows when we find one of these again. Now our job is to just find the way out and find the others, and we are literally jogging past masterpieces (of course we saw the Mona Lisa first thing, so basically, the shittier masterpieces) and Bess is saying man I actually liked the Egypt room, too bad we couldn't - but then she stops herself because she does not want anyone to turn around
We go through huge square rooms each the size of my entire house, with massive lofty velvet drapes, paintings, and wood floors so squeaky we are like elephant mice, no way any of Louis' kids snuck out in the middle of the night in this place, you couldn't take a STEP without setting off the wooden floor alarm. Eve is on the phone to Nathan to see where they are, and there is bad service so we don't know where the hell we are, but we know Bruce is in front of the Louvre on the phone, his ticket apparently only bought the access to the arch in front which had reception to Indonesia.
Two of our favorite spots were a luxurious painted gold ceiling in a hallway, Galerie D'Apollon, much like Versailles would look later when we saw it, but with about 30 thousand less people. And just stopping for a moment to look out the paned windows of the Louvre at the courtyard, the other half of the building arching around out the window, across the vast cobblestone, and imagine living in this space with Louis, when he was waiting here, looking out and wondering why his mistress kept having children, and why he thought their nanny was sort of a hot chick too. Or that maybe he stood here, on a rainy day, itching his enormous wig and wishing for Kentucky Fried Chicken.
As my friend Kurt summed up on a trail ride, before our trip, I did the Louvre in 40 minutes.
We ate lunch back at our hotel when we got our bags, in our grassy courtyard, food gathered from the boulangerie across the street, our favorite place. The light switches in the hotel kitchen bathroom are outside the door so when Emma and I went in, Nathan just kept flipping the lights on and off the entire time yelling are you okay?? like we were having a lightning storm off the coast of Maine at midnight.
We left for our train to Versailles, with all our bags, Bess with her sword hanging from the Tower of London, she and Bruce sharing the skateboard. We passed a blue door. Walked as Emma mapped us to the train station closest to the hotel called Pont Cardinet, and Lilly the caboose looked back out the final train station doorway to the sky, saying wistfully,
au revoir, Paris
