Trip to Canada

 After driving two (12 hour) days, we arrived in Canada to visit Steve's family for the first time in eight years.  Here we are at Waterton National Park.

Noelle and her cousins Camille and Kaden.

 Fletchers on a boat.

 Noelle and Isaac played here while Laura and Lincoln hiked the mountain in the background.

 Enjoying the waterfall.

 

On the drive home, we were disappointed to see that there were no deer or antelope in sight, and that the skies were in fact cloudy and gray.  That song is a fraud. 

 Here we are sampling our Canadian contraband.

Canadian candybar taste testing.   Sweet!  (A little too sweet after about 10  minutes.)

Random Summer Pictures.

 Getting ice cream in downtown Iowa City.  Our goal this summer was to try out every local ice cream place. 

 Now this is the kind of driving I will allow my teenagers to do. 

 Noelle with friends at the park.

 Visiting the cheese factory.  We ate a lot of dairy this summer.

 Swimming.

 Getting dirty.

 Lincoln at scout camp.

 Laura at her flute lesson.

 More ice cream.

 Nauvoo fun.

 Yay for summer.

 

Paris, Day Five.

 The Louvre.  Gotta do it.

 Gotta stand in line for at least an hour (if you get there early).

 Gotta stand in another line for another hour once you're inside the pyramid thing.

 And when you are inside, you see lots of statues...

...famous ones, like the Winged Nike statue thing...

 ...and lots of opulence...

 ...and opulent stuff that old kings used to own...

 ...and some cool mosaics...

...and of course, this.

 For the next part of my tour, I will show you all of the paintings with subjects that are actually wearing clothes.  Let's pay homage to the modest ones, shall we?  This one--Jesus giving Peter the keys--I like it.

 And this one, which a local painter thought he would plagiarize openly.

 And my favorite--the painting of paintings.  Kills lots of birds with one stone.

 Very, very modest.

 This is quite a famous and large one.

 Also modest.

And modest again.  Alas, that concludes our "clothed paintings" tour.  If you were hoping for more, then sadly you came to the wrong museum.

 We spent the rest of the day walking around Paris, going in whatever direction our whims took us. 

 A lovely street on one of the islands. (Ile St. Louis?  Is that how you spell it?  Steve is never around when I am blogging, and I am sure I am slaughtering all the French names.)  It had a fabulous chocolate shop.

 Remnants of the Bastille.

 Where the border of the Bastille used to be...the marked line for it underground in a metro station.

Our last view of the charming hotel.

Paris, Day Four.

 Basilica de Sacre Coeur.  This was allllll the way across town, and it was quite the climb to the top, and I had to go to the little girls' room bad.  Once we were inside (all 5 minutes of it), it was interesting actually because that day happened to be a national holiday and they were holding mass.  I've never seen a mass in progress before.  I did feel bad walking around as a tourist while others were worshipping. 

 We spent the rest of the day wandering around Montparnasse, which was definitely my favorite part of Paris.  This is a picture of the ice cream place near our hotel.

 They made Steve a lovely rose ice cream cone.

 We ate our ice cream in the Luxembourg gardens.

Then we walked along the vast park edges, watching Parisienne parents play with their kids.  (The loveliest park was just that long stretch beyond the fountain.)

 For dinner we stopped at a random restaurant.  In Paris restaurants are never open before 7:00 PM.  Usually dinner lasts a couple of hours or more.  So we had to remind ourselves to eat slow.  This was our appetizer course.

 And our dinner course

That's a bone that Steve's fork is poking.  You are supposed to eat the marrow inside.  He didn't.  And Steve will usually eat anything.  I don't know why we took pictures of this meal.  It was probably the most mediocre one we had the whole time.  But I'm posting it anyway because apparently I didn't take many pictures on Day 4.