Sadly, all good things must come to an end. We flew back to Newark.

On our final full day in Paris, we visited the Musée d’Orsay and took a long walk around the Seine near the Trocadero and Eiffel Tower. It was an unusually sunny and warm day, and Paris was reveling in it.

On the 13^th we visited the Musée de l’Orangerie and the Louvre.

We awoke, after a night on the hill of martyrs, to the goings-on of the Paris Marathon right below our windows. It was a gloriously sunny day in Paris with fit bodies pounding their way down the rue. The only sensible thing to do, then, was to bury ourselves underground with the Parisian dead.

This day we crashed a bit and decided to take it “easy,” visiting the Hôtel des Invalides and the neighborhood where we got engaged: Montmartre.

On our first day, we visited the Île-de-la-Cité and the fire-gutted Notre Dame. Afterward, we ambled around the area and took a long walk along the Seine, through the Latin Quarter, and then took the train back to Place Vendôme.

Our trip started by taking a car from our place in Manhattan over to Newark (EWR). A few hours later, we would be grabbing breakfast at a nearby café and taking a post-flight nap a few hundred feet away from the Louvre around Place Vendôme.

The opposite of luxury isn’t poverty; it’s vulgarity – Coco Chanel

Recently we went on a babymoon, and it was awesome. Nevertheless, there was one part of my trip that really bummed me out, and that was the visit to the area around the Monte Carlo Casino.

As we approached the casino, I was expecting some sign of Old-World, European elegance.

But we did not see this. Rather, class and elegance evaporated as we traversed the approach to the casino. Like a Bedazzled ™ Grecian urn on a neon platform, the old-world casino was festooned with shops of the brands advertised to represent a high-net-worth lifestyle worldwide: Bottega Veneta, Rolex, Tag Heuer, van Cleef and Arpels, Prada, Coach.

Those aren’t special, they’re the exact same line-up of merchants as one finds on 5^th Avenue, NYC; Rue de Rivoli, Paris; Honolulu; London; Rodeo Drive; the promenade in Heathrow terminal 5. Why buy a thing in Monaco that you can get just as well in Dallas on your way home from the Whataburger?

Further, because fashion is a shell game of having pieces made in China and then having the work finished in e.g. Milan so that you can legally affix a “Made in Italy” tag, the fashion is derivative and boring. There’s no “Ah, that’s a closer European cut” or “Why, those French, they’ve gone nuts for pleats.” Instead it’s a homogenized gray goo of fashion where it’s one product fits all.