| Monday, June 17, 2013 -- Paris, France -- Day 2, Part 2 |

We me our docent Nicole at 3 PM for a private tour of the most famous Paris cathedrals, all of which are located on an island in the center of the river Seine. Nicole is finishing a PhD in gothic architecture at Columbia university in NYC. She had a notebook prepared for DB and really engaged him as we toured and compared various cathedrals, including Sainte Chappelle and Notre Dame. Dylan learned about flying buttresses (arch exterior supports), gargoyles (statures and imagery designed for water run-off), and how to identify a medieval gothic arch (elongated with a point at the top).

Nicole had an old daguerreotype photo from the 1840s of the Notre Dame cathedral for Dylan so that he could compare how it looked post-French Revolution but before restoration. The photo shows that all of the statues and religious imagery integrated within the Notre Dame cathedral's architecture were destroyed and/or be-headed during the revolution. The cathedral underwent an "interpretive restoration" designed to restore it to its original gothic state under the direction of French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the latter part of the 19th century .

A quick stop at the Orange telecom store and my iphone had a new phone number for France along with texting and data for email and internet. That allowed us to locate our travel mates, the LK and the F families, who were over in the eighth district, so we could take the Metro subway to meet them for a spontaneous dinner.

It is nice to have the six kids at one table and the adults at another. Like many places, the restrooms (les toilettes) are in the basement. The basement of this place also had additional seating and a cellar accessed by a ladder where the kitchen and bar supplies were stored. I would not want to be the guy carrying cases of tomatoes up and down a ladder.

We finished the evening off by walking down Avenue Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe and then climbing to the top of this famous monument for a view of the city at sunset before taking the Metro back to our hotel.