Out of Range: Paris #3, Ghost Hunting

I've been sitting on these pictures for a while. Lost touch for a few days, I may be back. We'll see.

Ok: here goes. On day 3 we woke up and decided "Hey, lets go nuts...go to Paris today!" So we made the trip into the city.

We wanted to stash our bags at the train station--since we'd checked out of the Paris Ghetto-tel--but when we saw the huge line at the train station, we decided to just carry our bags. But this also meant that we had travelled all the way up to Paris Est station when we didn't need to. We spent probably 3 hours more time on a train our last day in Paris than was necessary.

We wanted to go to the Catacombs, and we figured we'd hit the Orsay museum after that--it was free and all being the first Sunday of the month. We moseyed up to a book display at a convenience store and looked through their selection of Paris Guide Books (because, of course we were not travelling with one), until we figured out how to get to the Catacombs.

The Catacombs were creepy. I would not recommend going, it's really creepy.

Here's the story as I understand it: Paris was built by limestone, limestone comes form quarries, quarries in Paris are underground. One day, a bunch of people who were living near a cemetery got sick, so they decided that all the bones needed to go underground. Luckily, there was a huge quarry. They put the bones there. That was in 1770-something, since the earlish 19th century people have been making recreational visits to to osuary.

When we finally got out of the Osuary (it was a 1.7 km hike through bones) we were a little cranky. And Laura was HUNGRY. Which means: "I'm miserable! I need to eat or I will melt into a little pile of molten Laura in the next 5 minutes." So we walked around through a little flea market and tried to find some food that would suit Laura. There was none. We had to get back on the metro and go back to the sandwich shop by the Orsay that we had eaten at the day before. They make killer tuna sandwiches.

The Orsay plaza on Saturday.

The Orsay plaza on Sunday, Free Day.

Needless to say, we did NOT visit the Orsay. Instead, we visited the Legion of Honor museum, which was also free. As far as I can tell: It's a big honor to get a Legion of Honor medal, and they seemed to have every medal ever given out on display. There were some pictures of Napoleon in there too, he seemed to have something to do with it. The sad part is that they gave us audio guides in English, and we listened to them. I suppose you have to know what the Legion of Honor is to appreciate the Legion of Honor museum--because they're certainly not going to tell you if you don't already know, so there!