Anyway, thanks to a reservation at Jules Vernes, it was easy to get in and get a private elevator ride to the 2nd floor, enjoy yummy food, get lots of pictures, and then walk down to the 1st floor and back down without having to take any regular elevator or any lines, so that worked great :)
Going to the 3rd floor was not possible without very advance tickets, but honestly it's a small floor and the view is great from the 2nd floor as is.

Views from the top:

Russian orthodox church

This time around was a bit different due to the olympics as they had many blue seats/viewing platforms for the multiple locations the games happened at:

some hot air balloon in the middle of jardin des tuileries

pont de l'alma was totally closed, even to pedestrians

And on the 1st floor, there are multiple stores, as well as a VR game:

And stairs back down:

storing black powder and ammunition there during the war

turned out to be a big mistake and responsible for most of the damage seen today

found lots of cats all around athens, many on this site, and they were friendly

more cats :)

christian church added later

Good views from the site, of course:

parthenon doesn't look nealy as good

The museum was good:

this was actually a sensus counter for voting

The temple was in pretty good shape:

Also found that athens had wild tortoises roaming around

took the less busy south entrance, got in a few mimutes

While expectations were probably higher than they should have been, overall the place had suffered too much damage over the years and looked a bit disappointing to me. The fact that it used to house a church for a while, and was also used a munition depot and that a lucky shot during a war, ignitied and exploded all the black powder, causing a huge explosion, did not help. I was disappointd that after 40 years of renovations, it still looked like mostly pile of rubble, but was told later that there is apparently some rule that says you can only add 30% of missing materials, beyond that you're supposed to leave things alone. This is not my field, but I'd have been happy to seen it rebuilt, even if other material, to get a better feel for it. Of course the fact that the british stole half of what was left of the 2 triangle roofs and are keeping it in the british museum, did not help.

what is left of the decorations, the rest were stolen by the british

michoko bird!

The side temple, Erechtheon, looked a bit better:

One big plus of that location is that you can see all of athens from it and see many other sights:

what left of the temple of Olympian Zeus

and the rebuilt Panathenic Stadium where the 2004 olympic games were held

So maybe it was a bit bittersweet, but still very nice to see this site that was on my bucket list for sure

Seeing a small still working aqueduc was cool:

And here is the 3rd mission:

I'll add that getting tickets online is confusing, google gets you tickets to the church, which are free, but you need an extra ticket for the museum and ideally you want the guided tour or the audioguide, and those do sell out.

the church where the battle ended

some original frescos were found under the plaster

The museum had lots of artifacts, most of which were acquired by Phil Collins and donated to the museum:

cannonballs to musquet balls

When doing both the guided tour and audioguide, plus the museum, it took close to 3H. I still had to watch the movie after the fact to get the fuller story.

They also had a quick history lesson:

I'd say it's probably somewhat skippable, and somewhat out of town, but it was open when other things had already closed, so I went.

Nice views from the hill:

Had to go through 2 lawyers of security that do not even allow water in. That was non ideal... Eventually got there though, and we paid a private guide who gave us a 1h tour:

the stained glass, shipped all the way from Paris by boat and re-assembled, looked wonderful

I looked up the address in Paris, of course that was over 100 years ago ;)

After the castle, it was another walk through the park to another exit and got to see many vendors, to go to the excellent archeological museum across the street (but still a long walk):

nice insomniac looking owl ;)