Day 51: Musèe de l'Orangerie, Notre Dame and sad farewells

Shanny, Shazzy and Ken were already waiting for us at Café des Deux Moulins, otherwise known as Amèlie’s Café.

Day 50: Versailles and Offenbach

And today we go to Versailles.
Versailles: Loius XIV, XV and XVI’s monument to excess and decadence.  No wonder the people revolted. Luckily the palace survived the revolution, as I’m sure it is a great money spinner now for the French. Just like Ludwig’s tributes to the Sun King back in Bavaria are huge tourist attractions.
We met Shaz, Shan and Ken at Abbesses and metro’d our way, with a little bit of getting lost between line changes for just that little bit of added excitement, to our RER station at Musèe d’Orsay.

Day 49: Montmartre

I was up early, and decided to go for an exploratory walk around Montmartre while Michelle slept in.
There were still quite a few people in the Place du Tertre, even at this early hour.  I needed to get a map, however the tourist office wouldn’t open till 10:00am so I wandered around the mostly deserted streets, heading in the general direction of Sacré Cœur.

Day 48: Au revoir Rome, ciao Paris. Saving the best till last

Our last day in Rome.
It is always a little sad as I leave one place I have quickly grown to love, and yet of course exciting to think that I’ll soon be somewhere new.
Today we basically had a spare day free of any planned activities since the juggling from the closed Colosseum meant that we had missed going to Naples and Pompeii.  Naples couldn’t have been an option today as there was no chance we would be back in time to make our evening flight to Paris.  So today was an opportunity to sleep in and just take it easy. And today we did just that.
After our 10:00AM checkout, we headed off to Termini station to drop off our luggage. Seven weeks we’d travelled through Europe without any address tags on our luggage, but now I was feeling that my luck had run out, and I had best find some before we left our luggage in the left luggage.
There are a lot of shops at Termini.  Two levels of shops.  The lower level included a McDonalds alongside part of the old Servian wall.  I just love finding these old city walls, and this one is from the 4^th Century BC.  History plus.
But continuing on the search for luggage tags; most shops if they even understood what I was asking for did not have the damn things.  Not even the sure bet bag shop.  There was even a full on supermarket down here where at least I found a combination luggage lock so we could lock up the hand luggage, but alas no tags.
In the end I gave up and checked our bags in tagless and headed back upstairs.  I bought our tickets for the airport train ride this evening, despite those pesky “ticket helpers”, and then headed off down the streets of Rome looking for somewhere to plonk and relax.  The simple prerequisites being drinks and shade.
We sat down at a nearby restaurant but after 10 minutes without service, gave up and moved on. We decided to walk to Trevi Fountain again, especially as I hadn’t yet tossed my obligatory coins in. Half way there, wouldn’t you know it, we came across another fountain.  Rome is the city of fountains.

Day 46: A Roman Holiday

OK, let’s try this Colosseum thing again…

Walking there, I noticed what looked like a key embedded into the road between the cobblestones.  This caused me to pause, which was very lucky, as a bird shit then exploded on the road just in front of me.  So stopping to look at this key prevented me from getting bird shat upon.  This has to be lucky right?  It's luck if a bird does poo on you, so it has to be even luckier if one goes to poo on you and misses, yes?
We got down at the Colosseum just after 8:30 and yes, it was open.  There were queues but they weren’t too bad.  Wait, once inside the queues continue through the first corridor and around out of sight down around the curve; but really they weren’t too long and moved quickly.  As a bonus, Michelle as an EU citizen got in for free!  So that bird pooing incident was indeed lucky!
We grabbed our audio guides and started our tour.  I tried to get onto the underground tour, which would have taken us into the areas beneath the Colosseum, but there were no English tours left available for today.  Something to organise in advance for next time.

Day 45: Dead monks + fountains + ruins + cats = Rome

We got up nice and early and headed down to the Colosseum ready for the 8:30 ticket office opening.  You know, to avoid the queues I’d heard so much about. As we approached, we could see huge crowds.  But they weren’t at the Colosseum.  Instead they were lining the streets waving red, white and green flags.  There was only a small group of people lined up at the Colosseum, and the gates were closed.

Day 15: Gaudy Gaudi and Magic Fountains - Barcelona!

I was tasked with being the tour guide during our Barcelona visit.  The bar had been raised pretty high with Ken’s London and Edinburgh itineraries; I quickly knocked a plan up on the last couple of nights in London, and today it would be put to the test.

Michelle and I had a simple breakfast at Bar Castells on the corner down from our apartment: cured ham in a baguette with americano coffee and juice, while we awaited Ken and Shaz’s arrival.

The itinerary didn’t really make it much past breakfast when we decided to catch the Bus Turista to get a good all round overview of the city.

We walked up La Rambla to Plaça de Catalunya and queued up for the bus.  There were a lot of people, and everybody wanted to sit on the top deck.  We let the first few buses go, and it wasn’t too long though before some brand new, and more importantly, empty buses rolled up.  Then we were off.