Wind and Squalls 8-24-15

Today was forecast for rain throughout the day, and it started that way but settled into a pattern of wind and squalls.  No matter, as we had planned to spend the day at the Museum of  Plans-Reliefs, housed in the attic of one of the wings of the Invalides. It is one of 3 museums associated with the French Armed Forces in the Invalides, which was originally built to accommodate disabled veterans of French armed conflicts, and is the site of Napoleon's Tomb as well.
Because of the unsettled weather we took the Metro to a station just along side of the green space fronting the Invalides only 3 minutes from the entrance.  With clouds scudding across the sky we walked up to the site and got to within 100 feet of the entrance when there was a sudden spattering rain.

 Umbrellas out we rushed into the covered entry, but by the time we had our tickets purchased it had stopped and the sun shown.   As I mentioned earlier the Plans-Reliefs is located in the attic of one building 5 floors up and on a hot day is an unbearable oven, so today was almost ideal.  It was still pretty warm up there but we were able to see the exhibits in relative comfort.
The models themselves are built on a scale of 1 foot to 600 feet and show the citadels and surrounding land in exacting detail. But they go further and show the details of building facades, trees, grassy areas, water, cannon batteries,etc. They were built to help with planning for defense of the country and there are several hundred of them in the collection covering the entire country border to border.  Currently on exhibit there are perhaps 20 large models spanning the length of the attic space of about 200 feet, they vary from around 30 square feet to perhaps 150 square feet in size.
We had lunch at a little cafe just down the street and were thankful that there was space inside as the wind was gusting to gale force.  We would have been chasing our napkins, and food, down the street had we tried eating outside.


After lunch we walked the several blocks from Invalides over to the Orangerie, in another small short downpour, to see the small museum there.  It contains Monet's large water-lily paintings and a good small smattering of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings.  Its small but would be the crowning jewel for any museum in the U.S.  There was a large line outside and with my museum card we could only get two of us into the museum without having to stand in line so Deb opted to wait outside while Jim and I went in.  Jim and I had a nice discussion of the water-lilies paintings and then went downstairs to see the other paintings.   Jim professed great admiration for an Andre Derain portrait of Madame Guillaume, the wife of Paul Guillaume who amassed the collection in the early part of the 20th century.

It was a perfectly timed visit for us as when we came out it was sunny and we could watch the clouds racing across the sky at Place de la Concorde.
We took the bus back to the apartment and as we got off were seriously rained on for about 10 minutes to the point of having to shelter under an awning for several minutes before we got home. Jim was amused at the carnival of life occurring on the bus, a somewhat disturbed man got on to the packed bus with 3 large rolling bags and promptly got into arguments with several people including a nursing mother.  It escalated to the point that the driver had to stop, get out, and come to the back door to tell the man to settle down or be put off.  Jim wanted keep riding past our stop to see how it turned out, especially with the rain pelting down but we got off anyway.