On Friday, June 9, we arrived at the Louvre at 10am.  An hour or so later, our friends arrived, and then the 10 of us meandered about the museum, checking out artifacts and art among the roughly 5 million Chinese tourists who were also checking out the artifacts and art.  I took several Instagram “stories” that I thought were really funny at the time but are now gone forever, since they only stay published for 24 hours (including of a goddess taking a selfie), but I did get a picture of our 3 children crashing the wedding at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine (but not the strong, intoxicating wine that my children shouldn’t be around); we left before things got too rowdy.

Mona Lisa gazed at us reproachfully (best I could tell, as she had at least 500 paparazzi in front of her).

We picked Friday to go to the Louvre, because it stays open for extra hours on Fridays, so when it got really crowded at about lunch time, we left to have lunch.  Since it was lunch time.  Jim Bob and I had beers, because the wine Jesus made went to the guests who were actually invited to the party, not to us crashers, it seemed.

We strolled about the Tuileries Garden after that, and the children ran around and played loudly, so as to ensure that all around recognized that we’re Americans.

Then, we went to Musee de l’Orangerie, which had fewer oranges than I’d hoped for, but did have lots of paintings.  There were giant paintings of water lilies by Monet–in fact, there was an entire room that was nothing but enormous canvasses he created, and they were huge and, at times, fuzzy, as his eyesight was pretty bad by the time he painted for this museum, having already painted for the Louvre and other museums that are more crowded.  I liked its scale.  Beneath these giant paintings were several regular-sized paintings by Monet and other impressionists, and I found myself enjoying the Manets quite a bit.

Then, we went to a creperie, and all 10 of us had crepes, and it was amazing.  Mine had apples and cinnamon and vanilla ice cream on it, baby.  I then decided we should go back to America and start a crepes restaurant smack dab in the Bible belt called “How Crepe Thou Art” and serve up deliciously thin pancakes for the rest of our lives, but I probably won’t.

After crepes, we returned to the Louvre.  It was much better at 6pm, and we got to see all kinds of ancient sculptures and artwork without having to make sure our wallets were still in our pockets every 10 seconds or so (or maybe that was just me).

Our companions the McAllisters returned to their place of rest (but not the eternal kind of rest), and my family took the metro back to our place, wondering if 8:30pm was too late for dinner; it wasn’t.  We walked over to a pub called The Honest Lawyer for burgers and beers (plus whatever the other 4 members of my family  ate), and I decided I’d sell How Crepe Thou Art after a decade or so and run The Honest Lawyer until the end of my days.

This is what happy looks like:

And thus concluded our 4th day in Paris.