Notre Dame is a beautiful church and offers a breathtaking panoramic view of Paris -- if you decide to walk up the 440+ stairs to get to the top of the towers. Notre Dame introduced my wife and I to the thing that we would dread for the rest of our trip: Stairs :) If you plan to visit Paris and want to see some of the sights, get into shape. There are a lot of stairs to be walked. We saw Notre Dame on our second day in Paris and the stairs just about killed us. The view was worth it though. The other place that had an abundant amount of stairs was the Arc de Triomphe -- it too though had a good pay-off at the top, as the view from the Arc was also magnificent.

We saw some of the things from the Da Vinci Code -- and even saw the Da Vinci Code movie while we were there in Paris (book is good, movie is bad). We saw the "meridian line" and obelisk at St. Sulpice -- St. Sulpice has a bunch of signs inside for Da Vinci Code people explaining that the book is wrong, and goes into details about what is wrong about it. We also saw the inverted pyramid at the Louvre -- it's actually part of the shopping center and not the museum.

We visited the Arc de Triomphe, Concorde and Jardin de Tuileries. All of them were wonderful. I loved how you could stand at or on the Arc and look straight down to the Louvre museum. That was a fantastic sight.

The d'Orsay Museum was also a great place to visit -- though my preference is the Louvre as I don't quite enjoy Impressionist art much. But, it was still great to see the works of Van Gogh and Monet. I loved the feel of the d'Orsay as it was a converted train station, it still retains that feeling. Very cool.

Of course, how can we go to Paris without visiting the Eiffel Tower? I must say, this thing is an impressive piece of engineering (did you know that it is so well built that even on the windiest of days, it only swings about 4.5 inches?). We did not go up the Eiffel Tower, but we did enjoy the park in front of the tower. What a sight to see.

The best thing about the food in Paris? Dessert! Mmm. Tartes and eclaires. Just let the picture do the talking, ok?

It was a bit cold when we visited...