The news of the fire at Notre Dame in Paris was devastating to follow along with as the blaze continued to spread throughout the day on Monday of this week. Many people from the office and on Twitter were reminiscing about their own visits there in the past, which got me looking back at old photos of mine.

We visited Paris twice, once together on a tour in 2014 and again when Elyse was little in 2016. Both times we took walks down the Seine to Ile de la Cite. When the weather’s good in Parisian summer, the walk along the river and the site itself on the island are incredible.

The iconic towers on the front are enormous and ornate for an old structure, but my favorite pieces of architecture are the flying buttresses visible from the courtyard area, and the eroded gargoyles studding the sides.

I’m fortunate to have seen it multiple times. It’s a truly amazing structure in a beautiful city. Disasters like this week’s fire are an eye-opener to how fragile many of our historic sites and artifacts are. A run-of-the-mill electrical fire can undo so much history. The silver lining is that the firefighters on the scene were able to save it from total destruction.