We spent a couple of days and a night in Paris this week. It was one of the first European cities we visited on our first magical trip in 2015 (London, Paris, and Rome) and it’s still beautiful. It’s such a huge city as you can see from this vantage point in the artsy Montmartre neighborhood, with its beautiful basilica and the inspiration of one of my favorite impressionist paintings by Pissarro: The Boulevard Montmartre by Night. We worked off our breakfast climbing the 100+ stairs to see this gorgeous view!

One of the things we missed in our last trip to Paris was the famous palace and gardens of Versailles, southwest of Paris. Seeing this beauty is mainly why we went this week, hoping that the crowds would be lighter on a drizzly Wednesday in mid-May (we were so wrong!). We picked the only day of rain we’ve had since we got here to go and slog about in the gardens, but it couldn’t dampen our sense of wonder at the amazing palace and the enormous grounds.

We walked out to the edge of the Versailles grounds to see the Queen’s Hamlet, a picturesque, fairy-tale like village created for Queen Marie Antoinette to spend time in the late 1700s.

Lastly, before we returned to Orléans, we stopped by to see the progress of the repairs of the Notre Dame cathedral. It was tragically damaged by fire in 2019, during which the church spire was destroyed along with much of the roof. As you can see, the spire has risen again, and the church re-opened last fall. There is still plenty of work to do on repairs, but it’s good to see such a beloved landmark standing tall once again. While we did not see the inside on this trip, we were very fortunate to walk around inside in 2015.