Paris in the early morning

Perhaps the most perfect moment of the trip was finding myself on the Champs-Elysses as the semi haze of nighttime yielded to morning with hardly anyone on the avenue. The patesseries were just starting to stack their carts and shelves with bread and pastries; the streets were being washed; the Arc de Triomphe looked ready to bear another day's load of traffic, history, and visitors. This Paris, not the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, Notre Dame, or Montmatre, felt like Hemmingway's Paris in the '20s. This was surely my moment of Paris that will stay with me forever. Eventually the myth faded as I found the 24-hr pharmacy and the Alka-Seltzer that remedied the excesses of the previous night. Paris in the early morning: there's nothing quite like it.