PARIS -- Please pardon me if this blog is a little rambling. It's 10:45 p.m., and we just got back to the hotel after 12 and a half jam-packed hours through the streets of old Paris, the Orsay Museum and Montmartre.

And I found out this afternoon, which is morning in Milwaukee, that Brett Favre is retiring. Surprisingly, no one was talking about it on the streets of Paris. Well, except for me to my disinterested wife.

Anyway, we're dropping off the BMW at the airport tomorrow and flying to Madrid at 5 p.m. After the debacle on the way into town, I wanted to make sure to get the remaining important stuff out of the way today.

Our minds clearly focused on the mission ahead, we left the hotel at 8:45 a.m. and followed our buddy Rick Steves' Paris walk agenda. I'll spare you all the details of the four-mile walk, but we hit Notre Dame, the Deportation Memorial, the Left Bank, the Latin Quarter, Place St. Michel, Sainte-Chapelle, Conciergerie, Pont Neuf and much more.

All of it made for a fun and scenic walk, and I probably snapped 200 digital pictures. Never before have I appreciated the technology of a digital camera. Just go nuts and worry about it later.

The only real surprise for me was the Deportation Memorial, the spot commemorating where the Nazis shipped Jews, Gypsies and other undesirables off to concentration camps. As an American Jew, I've been exposed to the stories of the Holocaust my whole life. As a college student in Washington, D.C., I visited the Holocaust Museum several times, and never once shed a tear. I always thought it was because it just wasn't surprising to me anymore. But somehow, being in a city in which people actually were sent to death camps, I was overcome with emotion. After a few minutes, I left and didn't look back.

We wrapped up our four-hour tour at Pont Neuf, the centuries-old bridge crossing the Seine, and jumped on the Metro to the Orsay Museum. Some may disagree, but I found this converted train station to be a significantly more rewarding experience than the Louvre.

Unlike the Louvre, which contains the old masters, the Orsay focuses on works from great artists like Monet, Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Cezanne, Seurat and Van Gogh. I found these paintings more approachable, less stuffy and more visually appealing, and the museum itself is clean and well laid out. Having seen a handful, but not a ton, of world-class museums in my time, the Orsay is now my favorite.

After several hours absorbing this beauty, we again hopped the metro to Montmartre, an artsy community set upon a butte on the edge of Paris. This neighborhood became my favorite spot we've visited so far. We wandered through the skinny streets, stopping to see Picasso's studio, Toulouse-Lautrec's house and Van Gogh's apartment.

When we ambled down the hill, we grabbed a drink at the Café des Deux Moulins. That's the restaurant featured in "Amelie," and it wasn't touristy at all. Instead, it felt genuinely French, though the music was mainly from The Doors. I'm not sure, but I think the French have a thing for Jim Morrison, which makes sense, as he spent his final years here and is buried in Paris. Doors' memorabilia is all over the place in this town, second only to Le Chat Noir stuff and tiny Eiffel Towers. And yes, we bought trinkets depicting both.

Finally, we saw the Moulin Rouge, home to one of my least favorite, and one my wife's most favorite, movies. It looked neat lit up, much better than the sex shops of Pigale that we passed before jumping on the metro back to the hotel.

Tomorrow might be a complicated day. Our car is running on fumes, with maybe enough gas to make it to the airport. We have a vague idea of where the closest gas station is, and an even more vague idea of how to get from that gas station to the airport. I plan on vigorously studying Google Earth before we set out. If time allows, we'll do something quick and easy to bid farewell to Paris.

We get into Madrid tomorrow night around 7 p.m. (if all goes well), and by the time we get to our hotel and get the lay of the land, I'm not sure I'll have time to blog. I'll try to write something, but don't expect the great Spanish novel.

A few final random Paris observations, then it's time to pack:

Without fail, doors seem to open the opposite of how I expect them to. Inevitably, when I thought I should push, I should pull. Whenever I thought I should pull, I should push. I don't recall having this problem in Milwaukee.

The woman manning the gift shop register at Notre Dame expressed the most stereotypical Parisian indifference I've seen so far. Even though there was a line, and we were standing there ready to buy a souvenir, she continued working on her word jumble with her co-worker for at least a minute. Both clerks completely ignored the customers, while I stood there, agape in astonishment.

Speaking of surly, some dude yelled at me for taking a photo of a band playing inside the metro station. I thought it was cool to see a three-piece band playing jazz, and as I rode away on the moving walkway, I snapped a quick photo. This grizzled and furious man shouted swears at me (I recognized the French equivalent of the "F word") as if I was pointing a gun, not a camera at him.

Not to harp on the whole "inventing democracy" thing, but the French sure did like to execute people. At the Conciergerie, we saw the last stop for Marie Antoinette and a few thousand of her closest friends, before they met the "humane" guillotine.

Hearing about Favre's retirement via two text messages left me feeling like I'm missing an historic Wisconsin moment that people will talk about for the rest of their lives. Is it like people speaking of Kennedy's assassination or the Challenger explosion, in which everyone remembers where they were when they heard?

I, personally, was waiting for a train to Montmartre, and I feel like about a million miles from home. (By the way, my co-workers tell me we had the Favre story four minutes before the Journal Sentinel. Kudos, gang, for being on the ball.)