Paris: The End of the Story. Part One

Let’s begin with “the rest of the story”. I’ll break it down into two or three parts, depending on time and how many photos I want to upload. The photos you’ve been seeing so far have been from my cell phone; the ones uploaded from this point to the end of the France installments will be from our regular camera.

First of all, we said goodbye to our hosts (and friends…) and they headed back to Châteaubriant to beat the traffic out of the greater Paris metro area. So we were on our own… and caught a bus toward a train station. (Apparently not the right bus, or the right station… but it still got us into Paris without much trouble.)

Along the bus route we spotted a store called “Intersport”. We had been looking for one since shopping at the one in Châteaubriant; our big souvenir hope was to find some cycling jerseys that were locally French. Intersport had team jerseys from the world cycling teams that you can buy anywhere, and something that celebrated Britany (the northwest portion of France). Britany would have met our requirements except for one little thing, the colors of the flag, which the jersey was modeled after, are black and white. The flag of the region looks similar in design to the American flag, except that the stars are replaced with other symbols… black and white stripes and a black field with white “symbols”. It just didn’t do it for us…

We tried to find bike shops in smaller towns, and they carried bikes – but either no clothing, or a very limited (and very plain) selection. And apparently clubs have their own jerseys, but aren't available publicly... as seen with some riders in Châteaubriant. So here was Intersport in Villepinte – we thought this would do the trick. But, no… they had NO bike clothing at all. The mall that they were located in had a very thick cross section of people from all over the world, and as we’d find out later we were in a section of town that one woman said compared to America’s ghettos. But we found a patisserie there that had some interesting pastries just coming out of the over, and we bought one figuring we’d split it. One bite was all it took and I was back in there buying a second one.

We were pretty walked out from our Paris expedition the previous day, but figured that we needed to see the Louvre (or after finding out how huge it was, seeing at least part of the Louvre)! Not being much of an art aficionado, I was delighted to have heard of two items there: the Mona Lisa (also known as La Gioconda or La Joconde), and the Venus de Milo. I figured that if we saw these, then we’d seen two of the biggest names in the place… and we’d certainly see a bunch of other items along the way trying to seek out our two targets.

The Mona Lisa was the only painting we saw that was kept as far away from the crowd as it was. Perhaps there were others, but where most had a separation of just a few feet from the viewers, this painting had several barricades, guards and glass protecting it.

But we hunted these two treasures out, and I’ll end this installment with these two words: Mission Accomplished!