PARIS

Life in Belgium has been very busy and I am a bit behind on writing in the blog. We have been so lucky to take some trips to see friends and also lot's of history! On July 9, 2009 we drove from Brussels to Paris, France! We have a close friend, Brenda (Heiskell) Heusaff that lives just outside of Paris with her family and we went to see them. Brenda's brother Martin Heiskell has been friends with Stig since they were 5 and 7 years old. Martin and his family were meeting us there in Paris to visit Brenda's family. We stayed in a cute little hotel in St. Cloud called Quorum. We had two rooms and it was about 130 Euros per night, per room. It was clean and nice and we had free breakfast and it was only 5 minutes from Brenda's house. On the first night Brenda prepared Ratatouille over rice for dinner and it was delicious! The girls were especially excited to be eating Ratatouille in Paris since "Ratatouille" is one of their favorite movies. Brenda's daughters Morgan (20), and Mara (17) were so sweet as usual! It was great to see them all grown up. Martin's children were there visiting Tia Brenda so we got to see them too. Cameron (16) and Mariella (13) were also very nice and sweet and the girls really enjoyed spending time with Mariella. On Friday morning Stig went to the airport to get Martin and his new wife Betty who were flying in from Texas. We all went out for lunch at a nice little restaurant just down the street from Brenda. Martin and Betty were really fighting the jet-lag during our lunch! When it was time to pay the bill Brenda and Martin gave Stig cash and he was going to pay the entire bill with our new Visa card that we had from our new Belgian bank account. It was denied! Panic! We knew that there was no reason for the card to be denied, here you have to use a code to use your visa and we had the code that came directly from our bank with us! It just would not work, so Stig ended up calling the bank directly and they advised him to go try to use it at an ATM machine. Brenda took him to one and he was able to get some cash out, so we thought that the issue had been resolved. NOPE! We never did get that visa to work in France and we had to pay for our hotel and our gasoline and food all in cash that we had to continue extracting from random ATM machines because you can only take so much money out at one time. It was so frustrating. It took an entire week of phone calls and personal visits to the bank to FINALLY get instructions on how to activate our visa! Stig had to find a special VISA ATM to activate this card himself. You would think that they could offer some information regarding the "special" activation instructions, but they did not. Oh well, at least he was able to get it working before our next big trip.

Paris was amazing we went to the Louvre with our friends on Friday, July 10 and it was just so beautiful. So many amazing things to see. The Mona Lisa is not so impressive surrounded by so many other amazing pieces of art, but it was still awesome to see it in person. The security guards at the Mona Lisa display noticed our girls and Mariella trying to get a glimpse through the crowd and they made everyone move out of the way and brought them right up front! That was really nice. After our visit to the Louvre we all headed to the Metro to go back to Brenda's house for dinner. We went food shopping and loaded up on enough food to feed an army! We had chicken, potato's, zucchini, cheese, pate, bread and of course WINE!

On Saturday, Martin and his family were headed to Italy and Brenda's family was headed off to England to meet her husband for the weekend. So it was now just us! We hopped on the Metro and headed for the Eiffel Tower. The girls were so excited to see the "Heiffel" tower as Isabella calls it! We took a lot of pictures, but the line was so long to go up to the top that we decided to save that for another trip. We walked all over Paris and saw so much beautiful architecture. We had lunch in a little Boulangerie, boiled eggs, yogurt and BREAD, yummy bread. We continued on our tour of Paris and saw the Arc de Triumph and just walked around and enjoyed being there.

After a long day of walking and site seeing we took the Metro back to our hotel to get our car and drive the 3-1/2 hours back to Brussels.