Eiffel and Rodin

Time is getting short and we hadn't yet visited a few of the sites we wanted to get to. So today we took the Metro to the Eiffel Tower and then later hoofed it to the Rodin Museum. We left early enough so that we were competing with the rush hour crowd underground, but we managed to get to our chosen destination without any trouble before most of the crowds arrived. The Tower is the most visited of the sites in Paris and it has long lines of tourists and very many guys hawking varied sizes and shape replicas of the big tower. Since we had been to the top a year ago, we opted to watch from below and marvel at the hugeness of the place. I always wonder how they were able to build such a structure in the 1880's without our modern tools.

I took some photos from very near the base to try to catch the scale of it.

Comforting to me and to perhaps many others, there were security guys, gendarmes with machine guns, strolling about doing, probably illegal in the USA, profiling of visitors.

Then off we hiked the several blocks to the Auguste Rodin Museum. Very many of his famous sculptures are located in the gardens there. He's one of my favorite sculptors and I took quite a few photos there. "The Thinker" is one of his most famous and it sits in what is called the Rose Garden, for obvious reasons.

After lunch at the museum we came back to the Ile de la Cite to finish the day. There are favorite parks nearby that I revisited, including the one just across the Seine from Notre Dame near the Cathedral of St Julian the Poor. It's well endowed with the blooming flowers of August.

Ah, Paris.