A wash out

Our grand plans of visiting the Louvre Museum today had to be put on hold unfortunately. I had planned and printed out a treasure hunt for the kids to do within the museum and we had been talking about the Mona Lisa for weeks dishing out cool facts about the picture so we were all super excited about visiting. The kids had also selected two or three other things that they were really interested in seeing (we didn't want to over-do it on our first visit!). 
The problem was that we hadn't pre-booked the tickets because you had to collect them from somewhere in Brussels which was impossible for us to get to due to work commitments through the week. We'll just get there early, we thought.  However, what was early for us was late for thousands of other tourists! The queue just to get in was over a two hour wait. In the pouring rain. It wasn't going to happen. We were all disappointed as we'd built up the visit but we reasoned that a lot of the tourists were on a once in a life time trip as we saw huge groups from Canada and Japan with tour guides. As we only had to come from Brussels we could easily pop back for another weekend. The kids were happy with this decision so we ended up going to the Pompidou Centre which was a great result as it is so kid friendly and free on the first Sunday of every month!

On the train on the way back home Olivia declared that she was 'so going to live in Paris' when she's older because of the 'fashion, poodles, art and croissants for breakfast!'

It really is a beautiful city...even in the rain.