Today we decided to split up, so in the morning Mil took Annie and they explored the Marais shops and checked out the Picasso Museum. I took the boys and had grand plans of exploring the Catacombs Museum (and I checked that it was open this time). Getting there was relatively straightforward – just the one change of train a couple of stops from the Bastille, but on arrival we were confronted with an enormous queue that didn’t seem to be moving at all.

So quickly improvising we implemented Plan B – another visit to the kid’s favourite park, the Jardin de Luxembourg. This park has a great flying fox, and when we arrived there fairly early, the boys had the play equipment to themselves. We spent about an hour and a half there (I was just kicking back watching) before taking the Metro back (three train lines this time) to meet up with the girls at lunchtime.

We all had lunch together before Zach and I headed off for our turn at the Picasso Museum. This museum is conveniently located in the Marais district, so it was a nice easy walk through the Jewish quarter to get there. The museum itself is made up of all the paintings in Picasso’s possession upon his death. In lieu of payment for all the taxes that he owed, he bequested his remaining works to the state. Upon taking control the government turned the artwork into a museum, which opened in 1985.

The museum contains a good collection of his early works, including The Little Girl in a Red Dress, painted in 1895 when Picasso was only 14 years old.

After the Picasso museum we wound our way towards the Louvre for a second visit. En-route we stumbled across a big brass/woodwind band playing. They attracted quite a crowd and were very talented.

Enjoying our "boy" time, Zach and I quickly arrived at the glass pyramid entrance and were waived straight through. This time we took a themed approach, and followed a museum “food” self-guided tour, which lead us to various points in the museum to cover off food in a whole spectrum of artwork. Half the fun was following the instructions from one piece to the next, as the tour took us to corners and floors that we hadn’t gone near on our first visit. A particular highlight was when we travelled to the far end of the first floor, before entering a hidden stone spiral staircase up to the top floor. At this far end of the building, we were far away from the maddening crowds and my pet hate – the selfie stick. We only encountered a couple of people in each large room, which made the whole tour more pleasant. We read about each piece from the self-guided notes, a vital ingredient in any successful gallery visit. Without the online guide, you’d struggle a lot with the French blurbs on each piece (and the phone reception was poor making Google Translate difficult.

We only made it through around eight of the tour checkpoints, however as we cut a cross section through lesser-known parts of the Louvre, we were able to stop and browse at quite a range of the pieces on display. Overall, it was a much better visit, even if it was only for an hour and at the end of the day when we were both quite tired. You really could spend weeks in this magnificent building, and the mind boggles to guess how much the entire collection is worth ($100 Billion?). We can thank the former curators of the Louvre who managed to strip the museum of all the valuable and movable pieces during WWII, and hid them in chalets around the country.