Père Lachaise

I finally got around to finding the final resting place of Jim Morrison. This seems to be the go-to activity for all visiting Americans, and music fans in general.

Despite the masses flocking, it's a perfectly pleasant place to take a stroll. Autumn is as good time as any. While we don't have the fire of the sugar maples setting the landscape alight like it does in New England, we occasionally get some yellows and golds.

Most of the time, the leaves just turn brown and fall off though.

And....

That's it.

It's barricaded, so you have to jockey for prime photo-taking position.

Kind of sad, but instead of people leaving their graffiti on the Morrison grave, they now leave it on all the surrounding tombs within reach.

Afterwards, a little pick-me-up.

Crepes and Cidre at one of my favorite places in the neighborhood, West Country Girl. You can get crepes pretty much everywhere in Paris. They are ubiquitous as the New York slice, with stands street-side serving ones with ham and cheese or nutella. It's worth the effort to find a place that's doing a truly extraordinary favor to crepes, especially if they are drizzling them with their homemade salty caramel sauce.

Neh-neh. I got something you can't have.

Henri le Roux caramels. You can get a sachet of assorted flavors to figure out what speaks to you (Green Tea! Fig! Passionfruit!) but what you really don't want to mess around with is the Salted Butter Caramels- called "CBS" Caramels au Beurre Salé. Oh. Oh. Oh. They are the most perfect of confections. I have had several incarnations of salt caramels (lots of good ones, including one from Long Island that was swoon-worthy, and one made from goats milk), and this is really something else, with a perfect balance of saltiness to crunch on. Addictive as hell.

His chocolates aren't to shabby either. The shop and the presentation is fantastic...very clean and minimalist, leaving you clear to take in the smells.

It's a good thing that these are prohibitively expensive (and rightly so as they are truly the best of the best). If I could have free access my jaws would be glued shut permanently with caramels and a terrible speech impediment would develop. Not ideal when my second language is challenging enough without a caramel lodged in my teeth.