Day 5 Versailles

Today was the day!  The adventure of taking a group to Versailles!  I love these kinds of adventures, except how early we had to wake up to get there for our tour. For me, the first few hours of the day are one of the best parts of traveling to a city like Paris/Versailles. We had to take the metro to the rail station, our metro card that we bought that gives us unlimited metro usage for a week also covers the round trip to Versailles, so that was great!  We got to the rail line just in time for the train that got us to Versailles and got there without a minute to spare to make it for our guided tour. We didn’t have to rush, just walked at our normal pace and got there exactly on time!  Versailles is CRAZY crowded and it was just opening so the lines to get in are unbelievable. We just walked over to the guided tour door, where there was not a single person in line, showed them our tickets for the tour, showed them our Paris Museum Passes and they handed us headsets and told us to wait for the rest of the people on the tour to arrive. It couldn’t have been easier. Even security took about 1 minute for all 7 of us!  We all looked at the huge line of people waiting to buy tickets and at the giant security line and felt like the smartest people in the world! LOL  traveling is amazing!!  Traveling smart and not wasting time on lines when you don’t have to and knowing how to time things out pretty darn good is an art form that Emily and I are really getting great at!  That is very rewarding to me!  Anyways, what can you say about Versailles??!  It’s huge!  It’s amazing!  It’s exhausting!  Our guided tour was SO worth it!  I can’t recommend something more!  If you told me I could pay what we paid just to cut the line and be able to go into the King’s Chapel in Versailles, I’d take it and be thrilled!  But we got a full guided tour of the Kings apartments also. Totally worth it!  Then we walked the normal path through Versailles and it’s just one unbelievable room after another. It truly is on a scale that is impossible to imagine!  Even having been there before, I still forgot just how HUGE it is and how much gold leaf there is and how many pictures and sculptures there are of all the King Louis’. Once you get through the Hall of Mirrors and are pretty much done with the actual Chateau, you have the gardens, the Grand Trianon, the Petit Trianon and Marie-Antoinette’s village. Also, today was the last day of the Fountains for the year til springtime. In other words, no matter how you try to tackle Versailles, it’s gonna frustrate and exhaust you while amazing you at the same time. It makes for a crazy long day!  I’m not gonna go into all the details about everything, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. But, I will say we loved it all. It’s a lot of the same thing after 6-7 hours, but that same thing is incredible!  We came back to our rooms and napped for an hour or so before heading out to dinner. We went to another place recommended by a customer called Le Grand Bain or the big tub.  It’s a newer place that has a young hot shot chef who is very talented.  Because there was 7 of us we had to do a fixed menu where we didn’t order, they just brought us stuff to eat. It was some very adventurous stuff!  Definitely put us all outside our comfort zone. Raw Scallops, ceviche, chickpea fries, all sorts of cheeses a giant lamb shoulder, desserts all sorts of side dishes and a pate. All things I don’t go searching for, but I tried everything and found out that some of the things that I didn’t expect were really good, like the raw scallops!  I won’t say it was our favorite meal, but it was definitely a great dining experience in a very well run restaurant!  We were all impressed!  So that’s this crazy day!  I’m exhausted and need to sleep!  Tomorrow is our last day in Paris for now. We have a few museums to catch up on. But overall it won’t be a crazy day!  But, hopefully you’ll all be in it with us coming along for the ride. Thanks and see you tomorrow!