Our last full day in Paris... and the last real day of our trip... Time flies when you don't have to look at your watch very often! We had just a couple items on our agenda: Notre Dame and Musée d'Orsday. Our unfortunate luck with Julian had given us the good fortune of being able to see a few more things in Paris that we otherwise would have missed.

We went to Notre Dame first, figuring that there would be longer lines there than at the art museum. First we went inside the cathedral, where we saw all sorts of wonderful stained glass, a nice Pieta, and this bas relief of the story of Christ. Perhaps there's more of these types of things in the world, but in my limited travels, this stood out as being quite unique.
We exited the cathedral, and then went to climb the towers. 400 steps to the top, but divided quite nicely; they only allow 50 people at a time, so that you don't get that feeling that you always have to keep climbing because there's someone behind you. A few steps to the gift shop (how nice), a bunch more steps and you're at a landing point where you cross from one tower to the other. There you can climb up to see the famous bell — "Quasimodo was here."
Keep climbing up the other tower to the very top of the tower, where you get a wonderful panorama of Paris. So it's not like you climb all 400 steps all at once, and nobody got too winded. Each of the lookouts as you climb Notre Dame is enclosed with a thick, twisted wire cage, so you can't take too many great photos, but you can still get some nice pictures of the gargoyles!
We worked our way down (talk about vertigo!), and exited the cathedral again. We went to the archeological crypt underneath the front of the cathedral, and saw some of the Roman remnants, as well as some ruins from not so long ago.
Then we headed over toward the Musée d'Orsay. We grabbed a bite to eat before we went in (gotta love the quiche Lorraine!), and spent a good couple of hours looking at the incredible collection of impressionist and post-impressionist artwork. There was a lot more to see in the other areas of the museum, but we were both a little museumed-out, so we opted to head out of there.
We headed out to walk down the Champs Elysées, and give one last attempt at finding ourselves some cool silverware. Alas, we didn't find any, but we had a nice walk through the Jardins des Tuileries and past the Ferris wheel and the large obelisk given to the people of Paris from the people of Luxor, Egypt back in the 1800s. By the time we walked up to the Arc de Triomphe, both Penny and I were pooped. We sat ourselves down on a bench on the Champs Elysées and talked about what we would do next.
The consensus was that we would grab our things from the hotel we stayed at the night before and mosey our way to our hotel for that night, which was further north, and closer to the airport. In retrospect, we probably should have had a hotel in the city, so that we could have had more time to enjoy another Parisian night, but our original plan was to be returning from Germany, and it made a bunch of sense at the time. So we got our stuff and took the metro out to the airport where we caught a cab to our hotel. Nothing fancy there... just a place to sleep and a restaurant in the middle of an airfield... so we ate, and we slept...