Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Armée

What a day.

We spent 8 hours on our feet today walking almost 7 miles around two museums and in between. We didn’t even get to see all of each museum either! We skipped probably 1/4 to 1/3 of the d’Orsay and 1/2 of the l’Armée. You could easily spend a whole day at each.

 

We got up early today (8:30am, yes, that’s early for us now!) and made our way to the Musée d’Orsay only to find a long long line. You see, most museums in Paris are free on the first Sunday of every month. We choose to get there early to try and beat the line, but it seemed many other folks had the same idea. Luckily, the line moved fast because there were no cashiers, just bag checkers. Amanda absolutely loved the time we spent here as impressionism is her favorite period of art and that’s what the d’Orsay is known for. We saw lots of Monet and Manet, van Gogh and Degas, Millet and Cézanne, Bouguereau and Pissarro. You can easily say Amanda was ecstatic to be there.

As soon as we stepped outside of the first museum, we realized it was raining. What? Raining? My weather app said it would be cloudy but it didn’t show rain! We schlepped it through the mild rain to the Musée de l’Armée.

At the Musée de l’Armée, we skipped SO MANY exhibits because we would have been there until midnight we if read everything. They have more sets of armor than you can keep track of and that’s only the stuff they have on display! We found a gun that shot in three directions at once, a cannonball about 2 or 3 feet wide, swords from the 1100’s, and Napoleon’s Tomb. We ended up buying an umbrella with Napoleon’s symbol on it before going outside for the last time and realizing it had stopped raining. Awesome.

Their World Wars exhibit is expansive and, while very interesting, you need a good two hours or more just for that. We did it in about 30 minutes as we were starving, and very tired from walking and standing all day. We decided to end our l’Armée visit and head home to cook some dinner. We had planned on getting an éclair at a bakery to hold us over until we cooked some pasta but everything was closed as everything does on Sundays in Europe. We ate some cardboard-like crackers with hummus that was supposed to taste like cilantro. But we didn’t care because we were finally eating and sitting, and the day was good.