Day 11: Versailles

This was our last long day (unless you count the flight home). But I'm not sure how much there is to tell. We took the train out to the town of Versailles, and walked through the palace. We saw the royal apartments, the Chapel, the Hall of Mirrors—all that stuff. If you've been, you know what it was like. And if you haven't, you can find enough information online to give you a really good idea. I guarantee you can find better photos than any of mine.

Before we went, I warned Marie that there would be a lot of walking. For starters, I said, the train station is more than a kilometer from the palace, as shown on on the map. Then I added, But don't worry. It won't look that far. The Palace and Grounds are so big that the kilometer you are walking in to get there looks like no more than a driveway.

Before this trip, I'd visited the Palace of Versailles at least twice, maybe three times. (I'm not sure if I went during one of those visits to Paris, but for sure I remember it during the other two.) So what struck me most about this visit were the differences with times before.

The main one is that we spent a lot more time in the Gardens than I'd ever spent before. Marie likes gardens, so we made a point of it. As a result, we wandered far enough out on the property to visit the Grand and Petit Trianons, which I had never seen until this visit. And beyond that, we visited the Queen's Hamlet. This is where Marie Antoinette went to get away from the stuffiness of court at the main palace. And as we wandered through the place, the idea suddenly came to me unbidden—this is exactly what you would get if you asked Walt Disney to design a French village! It has all the right elements—one of each—and is laid out in a way that looks studiously arbitrary. I can see it fitting in snugly along with Adventureland and Tomorrowland.

By the time we finally got home to our hotel, our feet were very tired.