StanleyWheeler

It was still Thursday. We left the Arc de Triomphe to begin our walk down the Champs-Elysees .  No trip to Paris is complete without a stroll down the Champs-Elysees . It was a bit of a walk. My wife didn't want to go into the fancy stores along the way. It was getting late, so we just wanted to enjoy the walk to the Louvre. Google tells me that the distance is 4.5 kilometers. That's just short of 3 miles in real measurement. It wasn't a bad walk...it was a very nice walk...but there were complications. Now that we had left the monument with the free restroom, my companion informed me that she needed to use the bathroom--complication number 1. We were also getting thirsty. I bought another Orangina--the precursor to complication number 2.  We made an attempt at addressing complication number 1 in the long park that runs along a portion of the thoroughfare. A sign indicted that use of the facility would be 2 euros. The place looked a little off-putting...so ...

It was still Thursday. We had just left the souvenir shop near the Pantheon. We were on our way to the Luxembourg Gardens. The sidewalk was pretty wide, wide enough for some shops to have racks of goods out on it. There was also a youth sprawled on the sidewalk. He had two suitcases next to him. The suitcases were red. We gave him a wide berth; there was something hinky about the guy.  I realized what the feeling was when my wife kicked the container, made from the bottom quarter of a clear plastic water bottle, which held a few coins, and which he had placed out in the center of the walk. The container was virtually invisible. She hit it solidly, like an opening kickoff. The bit of bottle went tumbling; the coins went skittering. Did I mention the grate across the sidewalk? Most of the coins went down the grate that was located about six or eight feet from the ambush site.  I found two of his missing coins that the grate had not consumed, both one centime pieces. I could...

This was on the wall of our room at the bureaucratic hotel: It's not the exact picture; I found this one on the internet. In fact, I remembering the moon as being bigger. Another thing we found in the room (along with the bottle of water and candy) was a menu. I also found this one on the internet, as I did not consider the menu something of which I wanted a picture when we were there. This picture is too small for me to accurately read. The actual menu that we found in the room suffered from a similar problem--not legibility, but accuracy. We spent some time deciding what we would have. I forget now what we finally decided to have...but it sounded good. When we arrived in the restaurant, we discovered a completely different menu. Apparently, the menu in the room was outdated; the selection upon which we had decided was not to be found on the new menu. We couldn't find anything on the new menu that interested us. Nevertheless, in our famished condition, not having...