Bateau on the Seine

I do love having company. Aside from the social aspect of re-connecting with old friends, it's great fun for me to take people around town. I feel like an undercover tourist, able to really see the city again through naive tourist eyes. I'm not sick of it yet anyway.

The day was warm and sunny, so we planned to have a picnic on the Champ de Mars, but we were going to get there creatively. We looked at several boat companies and settled on the hop-on, hop-off one so we could get back home eventually.

Well.

It didn't quite work out as smoothly as promised as we ended up waiting for several boats before one would actually let us on, and on the way home, the river was too high to pass under the bridges past the Louvre (but, you know...no announcement, just a bemused curiosity as to whey we got to turn around and do it all over again), so we ended up making another loop around and then having to take the metro home. Anyway...the company was fine, the picnic was good, and the scenery from the back of the boat was as good of a way as any to check out the city on a fine sunny Sunday.

That's the Tour Saint-Jacques. It was part of a church that was destroyed during the revolution, but oddly enough, instead of razing the whole thing in the aftermath, they just left the church steeple as a monument.

One odd thing to see on such a sunny day: jet contrails zig-zagging across the sky. It's usually so cloudy here, you don't see them.

Parisians will sit out by the river and picnic every possible chance they can get.

It's so dreary here for most of the year, it's a real mood lifter, and for days after a sunny weekend, you will see the people of Paris with telltale pink cheeks and odd tan lines.

Pont Alexander is, by far, the most ornate bridge.

Destination picnic!

The lawns around the Eiffel Tower are popular with locals and tourist alike. It's great people watching, and sitting on a blanket with our wine and cutting board of fromage and saucisson sec and good baguette got us in some starring roles of tourist photographs all over the world.