Notre Dame Cathedral and the Pont de l'Archeveche Bridge

     You know the phrase commonly misattributed to Marie Antoinette, "Let them eat cake"? Well when in France . . . I decided to eat cake for breakfast. And it was delicious! (The macaroons were for later. I bought them to bring home to my girls and mistakenly left them in my checked baggage. So we enjoyed macaroon crumbles when I arrived home.) The cake was called Mi-cuit au chocolat and it was chocolate cake with a dense chocolate center. I might have also eaten a macaroon for breakfast that day... making up for the first day...

     We spent our last morning in Paris visiting the Notre Dame Cathedral. I promised my daughter that I would climb to the bell tower and say hello to the gargoyles for her. She was disappointed when I told her that I doubted that I would see the Hunchback and the gypsy Esmerelda, but I can't win all of the contests for being a cool mom. 

    The line to climb the bell towers was quite long and slow moving but it was worth the wait. I hadn't seen an ariel view of Paris by day yet and really the view was breath-taking. Another one of those surreal moments. The stairs were quite narrow and steep, and seemed to endlessly twist up, and after eating cake for breakfast I may have felt a few times like I was going to die, but SO WORTH IT! Funny story on the way down, I was following a ten year-old British girl and her father. She was worrying the whole way down, and at one point I heard her tell her dad that she never ever wanted to do that again. Her dad's response was: "What if your husband wants to take you there on your honeymoon?" Without skipping a beat his daughter responded: "If he makes me climb it again, I'll push him off the top when we get up there." I couldn't stop myself from cracking up! 

 But back to the views, they really were incredible.

     Afterward we went to the Pont de l'Archeveche Bridge, Love Lock Bridge, to place a lock. It's a totally trendy thing to do but it was still fun. I put one on for my daughters. They requested pink and sparkly, which wasn't really all that unique when I noticed all of the pink sparkly locks on the bridge.