Summer in Paris

 

An extraordinary delight, the Jardin de Tuileries is a great place to stop after stuffing your head full of all things ancient and artsy at the Louvre. One final, near perfect day in Paris en famille, I took the kids to the Louvre to see the mummies (cats and crocodiles and sheep, o my!) and the sarcophages. We toured the whole of the Egyptian exhibits, then stopped for un sandwiche au jambon et fromage, un petit gauffre nature (that's plain old waffle with a bit of sugar ifyou know what I mean) for each of the petits; a juice for them, a cafe au lait for me, and a balcony view of all those tourists secretly searching for the Rosetta Stone to unlock all the myserious allegations of The Davinci Code. Then off to the Jardin for some car zooming and some bungee trampoline jumping... a magical flight through the air, a perfect cone of mango gelatto, an exhausted wander back up to the metro.

The Louvre was my son's first experience with a museum where he didn't know what was going on. Usually, we go see dinosaurs, or mammals, or space ships and planets. He didn't know what to make of all that Egyptian stuff. Time for another trip to the bookstore, methinks.

Would that there were more days like these. I don't want to have to become an expert on some other sort of life.