Soon after my last blog posting, we ran into trouble.... Our apartment sewer backed up and the apartment flooded. For various reasons, we decided we had to move, and do it right then. I looked for a hotel for an hour, while Shannon packed our suitcases. We headed for the Hotel Marciano late Thursday night, and we really hated leaving that wonderful neighborhood!

Friday was a really, really big day. We got up early and traveled out to the Palace of Versailles, the countryside palace of King Louis XIV. It was incredibly, unbelievably huge! The photos don't do it justice. The grounds were huge, too, and we spent a couple hours walking from one end to the other. We were nearly exhausted by the time we started the hour-long journey back to Paris, but we had lots more planned.

In the afternoon we attended a fashion show at an upscale department store in Paris. It was very cool, but all the fashions were far, far out of our price range. After a short rest, we headed for the Louvre, the premiere museum of Europe. That's another really huge building, and in the 90 minutes or so we were there, we saw probably 3 percent of the place.

After the Louvre, we hopped on the Metro to head to the Eiffel Tower. We had hoped to get on an elevator to the top, but the lines were way too long. Instead we just roamed around the area, and took lots of pictures. We caught the Tower's light show twice: once on the Metro train as it crossed the Seine, and again an hour later from Trocadero Plaza. Check out the photos and video.