Paris: Day Five

Our fifth day in Paris started out slowly, we had some croissants for breakfast, then set off south from our hotel with the ambition of finding the Avis location for our rental car pickup on Saturday.  In the process, we discovered a laundromat that we vowed to take advantage of later, and a McDonald's, where we had lunch, though I couldn't get their wi-fi to work.

The Avis location was on a streed called Rue Bixio, which was rather difficult to find, as it wasn't on our city map, and turned out to be only one block long, but after an hour of wandering around the neighborhood, we found it.

We then noticed that we were right next to Les Invalides, and we used our museum pass to get inside.  We toured the museum of the army, which had thousands of pieces of armor and swords and other melee weapons.  Then we found the stairs that lead to the WWI and WWII exhibits which were even better.  They had an excellent section on the French resistance during WWII. 

After a couple hours in this museum, we visited Napoleon's tomb for about 10 minutes.  There's not really much to see there, it's just a big tomb inside the dome of Les Invalides, but at least the audio guides are free.

We then caught the metro to the museum of asian art, which was very good, but the information on our museum pass regarding the hours was wrong, so we wound up with only 45 minutes to see it all, instead of the 90 minutes we expected.  Holly enjoyed it a great deal, and vowed to visit it again if she ever returned to Paris.

We zipped back to our hotel for a quick rest, then talked to the concierge about the laundromat we saw earlier, and he suggested a closer one that was open later.  So, we hauled our dirty laundry to it in my suitcase, and Holly watched the laundry while doing some quiliting, as I attempted to find somewhere to eat dinner.  I didn't find much (other than McDonald's) in the neighborhood that was still open, as it was now after 8:00 p.m., so after spending about 20 euros to do our laundry, we stopped at the same Italian cafe that we'd eaten at the day before, and ordered a pizza to go.

The pizza was a four cheese (quatre frommage) affair, with a white sauce.  It was very good, after I picked off the large chunks of bleu cheese on my pieces.  It was quite different from anything I've had in the US, probably closer to a cheesebread than any pizza.

We then turned in for the night, after watching the Eiffel Tower sparkle from our hotel room for the last time.