Of course, Paris holds more than one World Heritage Site, given that city’s well known status as a center of history and culture. And, of course, since I am on a Tour that includes visits to such Sites as a major goal, I could not pass up an opportunity to see the Sites of the City of Light. Technically, there are four Sites in the Paris Metropolitan area, however, two of those are small portions of much larger serial Sites whose components are scattered all around France, or even the World. One of those is a collection of seventy-eight historical structures around France related to the ancient pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. There is one component of that Site in Paris, a beautiful old Church Tower, which I did see, but I do not feel that seeing only one part out of seventy-eight is adequate to allow me to count that Site on my list of Site visits. The other serial Site is the works of the modernist architect Le Corbusier, which has components in several countries, including two private homes in Paris. However, I did not feel I should waste any of my limited time going to see a couple of ugly houses. Fortunately, the two other Sites are among the very best the World Heritage List has to offer. Here, I will not write a tremendous amount about them because I feel I am quite far behind my posting schedule and because, well, it’s Paris.

The first Site I visited was the Palace and Park of Versailles. It is located about twenty kilometers west of the city center, but is quite easy to reach using the Metro and commuter rail systems. When I arrived at 10:15 on a Sunday morning the line of people holding online tickets was already quite long, but it moved very quickly.

Of course, I found the artistry and craftsmanship of the Palace to be beautiful and incredible. The only drawback was that, because it was February, the famous fountains in the gardens were not operating. I also had a bit of trouble coming to grips with the creation of the Palace in the first place. Had it originally been intended to be a museum, as it is now, that would be another story, but it wasn’t. It was completely a vanity project for King Louis XIV, and there are well over one hundred images of him, in sculpture or painting, scattered throughout the building. That also caused me to question, in a mostly friendly sort of way, the motivations of many of our fellow humans, at least half of whom visit a Palace filled with amazing works of art, and only take photographs of themselves.

Paris also has many more famous landmarks, and since they are typically located in the city center they have conveniently been combined into one very large World Heritage Site, named Paris, Banks of the Seine. I had just one full day to visit that Site, and in situations like that I find it useful to not try to see everything, but just to make a short list of the places that are most interesting to me and visit only those. Even with that plan, I still ran out of time and missed a couple of places that I had hoped to experience. I began at Ile de la Cité, the island in the Seine that was the original site of Paris, and where I could see the now-ruined Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. During the second week of the Tour, I watched live news coverage of the Cathedral fire at a restaurant in Naturita, Colorado. Now, I was there, where the site is currently filled with cranes and scaffolding.

It seemed a little disturbing that it took me so many years to finally see the Sites of Paris, but now, as expected, I feel that it was certainly worth the wait.