Walking Towards Notre Dame

Today was much better.  It was pretty cold and windy, but it didn't rain.  We're having to wear a lot of clothing to stay warm.  Here we are crossing the Seine.

Today's walk took us in the direction of Notre Dame.  Examine this street scene, if you will.  Notice how many cars there are.  Usually there are tour buses as well, but not at this particular point in time.

This is an organized bike tour riding up that same street.  Yes there is a line painted on the road, indicating a bike lane, but there is no separation.  Notice the complete lack of helmets.  I'm not brave enough to ride there.  Many people do, many people don't wear helmets - but I will not be one of them.

This is a cute little truck.

When we retired, we wanted to live on a barge in France in the worst way.  Here are a few barges tied up on the river.  However, the logistics were just overwhelming.

Further up the water there were some big honking motor sailors. 

Here is the owner of a big sail boat leaving to go somewhere.  Notice that she's using a remote to raise the gang plank.  That is how they keep the curious off their boats.

Now we are at Notre Dame.  Once again there are mass quantities of people in line. We elected to stay outside.

We walked over to Sainte-Chapelle, intending to go in.  However, they were not open at that time.  It's an interesting church, it's surrounded by newer buildings and is not visible from the street.  The best I could do was getting the roof shooting through a fence.  The surrounding buildings seem to be administrative in nature.

This is a cop shop.  Look at all of the vans.  The police have a tendency to use their sirens when they want people to move, so they can park.

One of the tour boats on the river.

See the shiny stuff on the fence?  Those are locks.  Last year Paris officials had to remove tons of locks from the Pont des Arts because the railings were collapsing.  Now the people and their locks have moved over here.  It's not enough just to take a selfie, nooooooooo people have to write their names on a lock and throw the key in the water.  Sort of sounds like littering to me.

This is sad.  The building used to house La Samaritaine.  The store was founded in 1869.  It was a huge department store, people used to have lunch on the top floor so they could take advantage of the views.  Unfortunately, Jim and I never got there.  They closed in 2005 due to code violations.  It's now being converted to condos and hotel space, with a small retail space on the ground floor.

This was amusing.  There was a Japanese camera crew filming something at one end of Pont des Arts.  They're in public, they have not cordoned off anything.  However, they're all acting very self important and waving people away.  My thought was maybe they should have a permit and some official crowd control.  Naturally my first instinct was to get pictures of the models.  One of the self important people put a piece of paper in front of my face.  Fortunately there was no grabbing at the camera.

You can see their light reflectors upper left in the photo.

This is another side of the Louvre.  It's huge.

It was a good day.  We walked a lot, looked at a lot of stuff and enjoyed being here.