Time

Time flies when you're having fun apparently, and it has suddenly become clear to us that in a few days time we will have been here a week and it's probably about time we got on with the job of seeing some of the bits we haven't seen in a long time, and perhaps the bits we haven't seen at all.

As Julie observed in a comment a few days ago, one of the nice things about being "home" as opposed to being "tourists" is that we are free from the shackles of the tourist paths, but today we chose to follow them, joining Frank and Carol and perhaps two hundred million Americans, half the population of Italy, most of Spain and some of Germany along with a smattering of others in the early queue to enter the Museum d'Orsay.

There's not much point in describing the extraordinary former train station or arguably the greatest collection of the work of the great impressionist painters that it houses, as many have devoted their careers to doing, but it is suffice to note that by the time we were in a cafe not quite far enough away from the afore mentioned tourist path, we had already decided that in the event of a sudden mishap during lunch, today was already a "die happy" day.   Perhaps more correctly that should be "die happier" but who cares?

Exactly why we chose to walk to the Arc de Triomphe after lunch is a complete mystery, but we did. Perhaps it was simply to watch the traffic on that extraordinary roundabout for a while.  Just as  extraordinarily, everyone else who had been in the gallery that morning had thought similarly,  joining the remaining fifty million Americans for an assault on Avenue Champs-Elysees.  Who knows what we would have done if we'd had to ask directions of someone in French.

Tomorrow, perhaps we will climb the hill at Sacre-Coeur and wave back at the people peering out of the clock at Orsee, or we may just come to our senses overnight, and hang around for a while, drinking coffee and sampling some fine pastries.