I'm in the City of Light until Sunday, taking my 18 year old niece, Morgan, to France for her birthday gift. We took the overnight flight from Dulles on Wednesday night, arriving here to a cloudy gray city yesterday morning. We came to our incredibly tiny, but wonderfully orange hotel room and slept until 4:00 in the afternoon, which isn't the recommended way to acclimate to a new time zone, but felt wonderful. We're staying on the Left Bank near St. Germain and walked around the familiar 6th and 7th arrondissement after having splendid pastries and cafe creme at Laduree, which is literally just around the corner. We walked around until 9:30 and had dinner at a sidewalk cafe also just around the corner from our hotel. It's always delightful to share my favorite city (or one of my favorites) with a new person, especially one as observant and fun as Miss Morgan.
I slept until right at 2:00 in the morning, and then was wide awake. I could hear Morgan starting to turn over and stir around 3:30. We stayed in bed until 6:30, came downstairs to our contemporary hotel lobby and had breakfast. Now we're going to head to the Louvre, which I think takes up most of a day. The decorative arts galleries are open again after several years of renovation, and I'm excited to see them. We'll also try to go to L'Orangerie, which had just opened also after years of renovation when Brad and I were here for the month of May last year and had very long lines. We'll enjoy the Tuilieries, although it's kind of a cloudy day again and the flowers won't be at the biggest blooming.
We're here in Paris until Sunday afternoon, when we take the TGV to Aix-en-Provence for a 5 day horse riding excursion. I suspect the country farm where we'll going won't have a computer in the lobby with free internet access, and my phone and texting isn't working at all here -- so I'll probably be taking a genuine vacation from the computer for awhile. C'est la vie.
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