Last morning in Paris

We went on a lovely walk through the city and then along a canal that we have never seen before.

After stopping for the obligatory coffee and cakes we arrived at the Notre Dame for a guided tour of the exterior.

Our guide was excellent and told us all about it's history, and if course, the recent fire.

It happened in 2019 and all of the work was supposed to be finished by last year, but as can be seen, it's not done yet.

Our guide tried to tell us about various miracles that saved parts of the building from the fire, but I wasn't impressed. A couple of examples were that as renovations were taking place at the time of the fire, various famous statues had been removed a few days earlier from the roof so were therefore saved.

Also that firemen managed to stop the fire reaching giant bells in the towers that weighed up to 13 tons each. If these had fallen they may have caused the whole of the front of the building to collapse.

The cause of the fire is still a bit controversial, but what is definitely known is that the security guard in charge at the time misunderstood the fire alarm when it went off and looked in the wrong place, neither did he phone the fire brigade as he should have done. By the time more alarms went off and he did phone them they were delayed in getting to the building because of terrible traffic.

The fire had therefore took hold in the roof by then and burnt for many hours.

In my opinion, the miracle would have been that none of this need never have happened if the guard had done things right at the beginning.

Moving swiftly on, our final sight was of the Pont Neuf bridge.

We didn't go through it but it has been transformed into a temporary prehistoric icy cave and looked absolutely superb. Unfortunately it got a bit ripped in a storm a couple of weeks ago, but it was incredible, almost miraculous.