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Hello again. We arrived back home on Sunday night in Calgary after a few more whirlwind days in France. On Thursday, we had our second Paris museum day. We checked out Saint Chappelle church which is another Gothic cathedral with soaring stained glass windows that is just a few blocks from Notre Dame. We hit the metro again and went to the Picasso Museum and the Centre Pompidou which was closed because of a union strike. So we couldn't go in and ride on the famous escalator but it wasn't too much of a loss. After that, we went to the Institute de Monde Arab which is a really funky building of modern Middle Eastern architecture with a museum of ancient Arab history inside.

On Friday, we got on the train to Caen to visit the D-Day beaches. We hired a "private limousine driver" who was a crazy old man with an old car and some knowledge of the area. He took us to the Arden Abbey which housed the SS police for a while, the Juno Beach and the museum there, the first house liberated by the Canadians, and the Canadian D-Day cemetery. The towns there are still full of Canadian flags to this day and there are some German bunkers remaining on the beach.

On Saturday, we took another day trip to Chartres to check out one more Gothic cathedral in the French countryside. It turned out that they were having a one day medieval festival with fun children's games, lots of food, people dressed in costumes, and a jousting competition. 4 horsemen and their esquires put on a half hour show. It was all French to us but we're pretty sure that the good guys won in the end. We took an evening train back to Paris and took the metro to the Eiffel Tower since we still hadn't made it there yet. We decided to grab supper instead of waiting in the 2 hour line to go up the tower. We returned to the tower after supper and the line up was down to half an hour. We went up and got one last look at the city of lights.

Sunday was a day of packing up and getting to the airport. We managed to get seats together on the flight this time and they played good movies which helped pass the time quickly. Thanks again to Darren and Yvette for picking us up at the airport.

We hope you enjoyed reading about our travels. Watch out...we have 1100 pictures to show off and we're on the lookout for an audience.

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Comments

[Miranda]

I was wondering when you were gonna post your last blog!!haha Glad to know you had a good trip and a good flight home. I'm excited to see your pictures, but we may have to look at them in 1/2 hour intervals or something....WOW 1100 pictures!!