We woke, had breakfast, and headed to the Louvre (Judy stayed behind).  We took the advice we had heard from our tour guide and entered the museum through the subway entrance, thereby avoiding the long lines outside.  Phyllis and I knew that it would be tough to get the girls interested, so to make it fun we turned it into a scavenger hunt.  The museum guides come with a map and the major attractions are highlighted on the map, so we turned them over to the girls and let them guide us through the museum in search of the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, Victory, and so on.

I suppose in my younger days I would have sneered at tourists who go through the museum just to “check off” seeing the major attractions without actually taking the time to appreciate the art.  But now that I have kids of my own, I have to say that our strategy worked really well, for the most part.  The girls mostly enjoyed the museum and got to see the main stuff, and we were able to get in and get out before they got completely bored with the place.

Afterwards, we walked toward Les Halles to find lunch, stopping at a playground along the way where the girls played for a bit.  Unfortunately Les Halles was closed, and we wandered quite a while before finally finding something that everyone could eat – though the place we picked turned out to be a pretty bad pizza place.

After lunch, we walked back to the Seine and walked along the river, stopping at several pet stores and nick-nack furniture stores there.  From there, we took the Metro back to our area, picked up Judy, and had dinner at a very nice Italien restaurant near our hotel.