Day trip to Palace of Versailles
We left fairly early in the morning for
the trip to the countryside. We went to
the bakery and bought some sandwiches for lunch and then made our way to the
subway. We bought our train tickets to
Versailles and then took the subway to the station for the train to Rive
Gauche, the stop for Versailles. Once we
got to there, we just followed the crowd to the palace. We stopped at a ticket office outside the
gates to buy our day pass to the palace.
It was busy when we got closer to the palace but fortunately, it was not
yet peak season so there was still some breathing room.
We decided to walk around the garden
first as we figured it would get pretty hot later on. The gardens were big, with different
sections. We thought about renting bikes but the place we went to were all
out. So we stuck to walking. We walked as far as the Petit Trianon before
turning back to the palace. We had our
sandwiches out in the garden and relaxed on a bench facing the Apollo
fountain. We also picked up a couple of
souvenirs from the gift shop.
After lunch, we went into the palace,
which was pretty crowded and followed the crowds from room to room. The rooms were interesting but it was kind of
hard to really see anything because of the press of humanity. There was not a lot of furniture left as the
palace was looted during the French revolution.
There quite a few paintings though.
The Hall of Mirrors was pretty impressive. After we had enough of shuffling along with
the tour groups and other tourists, we went to have tea at Café Angelina where
we had pretty French pastries to fortify us for our trip back to Paris.
We made our way back to the station and
it was crowded. To top it all off, the
ticket machines were not accepting credit cards, and everybody had to dig for
cash. Petros and Florine went to the
little convenience store to get some change while I stood in line. Then Irene had to go get more change when we
counted our change and realize we did not have enough for the machine. It took more than half an hour to get our
tickets. Then we had to wait for the train. It took us a while to get back to the city.
We had dinner at the Café Du Marche,
which is on our way back to the apartment.
Where we stayed: Marais Saintonge
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