June 18, day 5.We decided to stay in the city today and go see a few sites. The first on our list was the Louvre. This museum was really great! We got there at just the right time, no line, no wait and no frustration. We used our handy little museum passes to whisk us into the Denon wing. We started out with some Greek & Romen sculpture. One of my favorites was Venus (Ms. Conner thanks for all of the lessons in Mythology). We also saw some panels from the Acropolis that were interesting. Next we moved on upstairs and saw the wings of victory sculpture next. We then took a turn off to the gallery into a gallery that contained at least a hundred paintings that all contained images of Christ, God, or the Virgin Mary. We slogged through this swamp of religion and bumbling tourists to find ourselves at the entrance to the Mona Lisa viewing room. It was probably a wonderful masterpiece but behind bomb, bullet, flash, and people proof glass among a wad of worshiping tourists it did not come across. We stayed there for five minutes and then clawed our way to the exit. We went to the other galleries containing, among other things, a painting the size of a billboard of Napoleon crowing himself. Our stomachs started to make their opinion known that it was time to get some lunch so we ventured off to the cafeteria. Once there we realized that it was nothing more than an over populated McDonalds. We decided that it would be much nicer to go to a small cafe just off the galleries. We had a wonderful lunch and decided that the time had come to do something else. We walked over to the Tuileries near the museum. If you walk straight down, it leads to the Champs-Elysées. We got to a ferris wheel at the Place de Concorde and decided to take a ride. (Todays picture was taken from the ferris wheel towards the Louvre.) Once done with that we headed towards the distant Arc 'd Triomphe. We came upon the Champs-Elysées while watching out for people-eating cars and starting to feel how very sore our feet were. The best way to to describe our fealings towards the boulevard: our feet got even sorer. The Champs-Elysées felt just like Fifth Avenue in New York. We were not enlightened by any of the stores (except for an ice cream one.) The Arc 'd Triomphe was a nice memorial that was a great place to be. Finally we took some back streets home, made dinner and dove in. It's 8:44 now so I'm ready to sign off for the eighteenth.