We started the day by booking a time to go up the Notre Dame towers. Fortunately staying a 15min walk away had given is the opportunity to walk past this several times to try and get an understanding of how the ticketing worked. There was no skip the line option and only 2 ways to schedule a visit (without getting a tour guide)- either online or onsite to book a time, and bookings could only be made for ghe current day. We'd checked both the onsite and online booking process during previous days and decided to book online first thing in the morning for the earliest possible visit (10am opening).

We were able to get our booking made online at 7:30am, for first thing that morning, and all went to plan. Many people were turned away from the queue not having pre-booked times, so it was definitely worth preparing for. The information could be improved to make the process a bit clearer - we werent convinced we had it right as the name if the app didn't match the French name advised on the wesite and had no explanation of what to do once the booking was made - even with our preparation we werent 100% sure we had it right. (Just to add to the complexity the admission to the actual church is free, and not part of the tower tours - and the queue for the church is incredibly long).

Anyway 300 stairs later up a tight narrow spiral stairway - you wouldn't want to be claustrophobic or have bad knees, we were at the top.

The views were great, and we were able to now recognise landmarks we had visited over the past few days. April got some great shots of the Eiffel tower from up there using the Zoom lens and a few different settings.

The cathedral itself is very tall, and has two impressive round stained glass windows (called the Rose Windows) on two sides (they are not very obvious from the outside but stunning from the inside). On the front it has statues of all the Saints (apparantly the heads of all the statues were removed near tge time of the revolution as someone mistakenly thought they were Kings and didn't want the church associated with the monarchs- they were put back on when the mistake was realised).

We saw two bells in one of the bell towers.
One bell was an original. The other 8 had been removed and melted down in the 1700's but replicas were made in the last 10 years to replace them. There are gargoyles around the rooftop intended to scare people and some have a dual purpose of channelling the water off the church.

We were disappointed to find that the tower climb didn't lead us back in to access the church, and we'd have to queue for that again. With the queue for that very long and with other plans to fulfill we opted to come back and do that part later.

In the end it was only Kate & Sarah that came back to see that, but the Rose Windows and the stained glass were stunning, so we were pleased that we did. The queue was even longer than earlier in the day but we found it moved at an unbelievable pace, probably because the church is so large that it's capacity is more than big enough to deal with the thousands of tourists a day that make their way through). Watching the speed of the people moving we guessed we were in for about a half an hour wait, but it moved so quickly it was only 10 minutes in the end.

After Notre Dame we checked out an outdoors equipment shop - well we thought it was one shop but it turned out to be one branded store with multiple store locations in a close range, each with a differect speciality eg one had tramping boots, another had packs a third diving equipment etc - we got through 6 stores before we asked for directions to the specific one we wanted. Good thing we did as it turned out there were 37 of them!

Then we split up for the day with the boys taking on the Army Museum and the girls headed to the Louvre, where we had identified a few things we were interested in seeing - including the Mona Lisa and the Crown jewels.

We had no issues with queues getting in - we ignored the online advice to use the underground access, but did come out this way and the queues there looked longer. Got offered hawkers tickets on the way in, and had an offer to purchase my used ticket on the way out - we declined both. Very reasonably priced as Under 18's are free, so only 15Eu for the three of us.

Inside there were a lot of people but just a steady flow and not horrific. April and Sarah squeezed their way through to the front of the Mona Lisa and got a good close up view and photo. I was quite keen to see the crown jewels - prominently mentioned in the brochure, and very disappointingly found them locked away in a glass cabinet 20 metres inside a room behind locked filagree doors - you could barely see the display itself - no chance at all of seeing what was inside it, even with a camera zoom.

On the up side we came across a gold chest made for Louis XIV while trying to find a different exhibit. It was made from gold in a filigree design and was amazingly intricate and had been used to store his jewellary - so that made up for the crown jewels disappointment. We didn't actually get to see the exhibit we were looking for at the time -- they had closed the acess through to one part of the wing on multiple floors, and to get to it we would have had to exit the museum and re-enter from a different point and by that stage we were a bit over the crowds and walking.
A good overall experience - we saw some impressive paintings in size and quality. We all agreed though that it probably wasn't something that Darryl and Scott would have enjoyed that much so it was good we went to separate places today. Note that we are still awaiting their trip report - but we heard it was pretty awesome.

Sarah: The Louvre was busy and a bit too hot.
April: I found the building interior more interesting than the paintings