There's old, and then there's OLD

Day two in Paris didn't let us down. We went to bed with a plan to beat everybody else to the Eiffel Tower but we failed to do that; between sleeping a little late, enjoying too many pain au chocolat, taking a detour to admire a farmer's market (where a cheese monger told me my french was perfect--now I'm really insufferable) to buy soft cheese and dried apricots and figs, and the fact that the tower was a 2 hour walk from our hotel anyway, we got there after 11am.

By that time the lines were already snaking around themselves, and my attempt to buy tickets online with their buggy system got me locked out of my credit card, so we were left no choice but to wait.

We opted to climb the 660 stairs to the second floor (you can take the stairs or an elevator that far, and then the summit, which none of us was remotely interested in ascending to, is only accessible by elevator). One kid and one adult have a healthy fear of heights and at least one of them couldn't get out of a crouch by the time we hit the first floor. The other kid braved the glass floor on that level. It's hard to tell from the picture, but you can actually see through it to the ground 115 metres below. Some people were absentmindedly walking over it while they ate their stadium-priced gelato. I peeked over it from the edge.

After this, two of four Fosters melted away and went back down. The other two, built from similar stuff, decided we would regret it if we didn't keep going. It was nauseating though--I had to focus on the stair in front of me because if I looked down I felt like my knees were going to give out. L's strategy was to talk the whole time--non-stop. It was a good distraction, actually. We high-fived and said we loved each other when we reached the second floor. It's a good memory already. 

Back on the ground, we picked up a baguette, fizzy juice and beer to put with our cheese and dried fruit and searched for a spot to have a picnic. We found a floating park on the Seine with wooden loungers and reclined in the sun, eating, united in Avoiding Vegetables Again Today.

We walked more along the river (running into a photo shoot, ooh la la), hopped on our bus tour for a bit, went into any shop that looked interesting, and eventually found a restaurant with an unoccupied outdoor table where we had surprisingly good pizza (no vegetables). On the way back to the hotel one final time, the kids and I got gelato that the server artfully scooped into the shape of a flower. It was another 23,000-step day (vegetable count, though: 0). We still can't believe the kids kept up with that, and really with minimal complaining or problems. Nobody even got a blister. As long as they had a pastry in their mouths or a wall of gaudy souvenirs to peruse, they were happy.

I managed to order a taxi from the hotel to the airport entirely in French because the person at the front desk's English was worse than my French. It was very weird to hear the sentences flowing out of my mouth--words I learned in grade school and probably continued to learn by osmosis from hearing so many mundane things in our two official languages. I'm sure it didn't sound as good as it felt, but the taxi showed up on time the next day and the driver knew who I was and where we were going. 

Today we're back in Mikkeli, taking it slow. We had the best weather we've had yet in Finland, so we hung around outside, drinking coffee, eating breakfast at the restaurant the kids set up for us, hanging out a thousand loads of laundry. 

After lunch we drove to a hiking trail that goes to the Astuvansalmi rock paintings, red ochre drawings on the face of a cliff that were made by hunter-gatherers in 3000–2500 BC. 

A 2.5 km (2.8 km, depending who you ask) hike through birch, spruce and pine forests brought us to the stunning site. Once you descend the final 100m down two sets of wooden stairs, you arrive at this hulking rock face overlooking a deep, pristine lake. On the rock, faded red figures start to take shape. The one that hit us first was the handprint, visible just under where the rock juts out most in the picture below.

It was actually really moving to be there, to think that the hand belonged to a human who was in this same place 5,000 years ago. 

In the bottom picture above, if you zoom in you can see a drawing of a moose like the one on the trailhead sign. After we had enough looking at rock paintings, we sat by the lake contemplating a swim. Three of us even got down to our underpants, thinking that might lead to swimming. But it just led to more contemplating, this time with less pants. To be honest I was afraid that either something prehistoric or a ringed seal would come up from the depths and bite me. I'm not sure what was holding the kids back, but in any event, nobody went swimming. After more pointless underpant time I stood up and noticed a kayaker quickly approaching, so, not wanting to have a Finnish encounter with no pants on, we scrambled back into our clothes and hiked back.