Our Trip to Europe

Day 37 – Paris, France

Saw most of our tour members this morning for breakfast. Quite a few of us are staying another day or so in Paris before returning home.

Since Paul and I wanted to catch the first train to Versailles, we ate a hurried breakfast and headed to the train station. Jackie and Ray caught up with us and while we were waiting for the train we met up with another couple from the US who were sitting waiting with a Rick Steves book in their hand. They were doing their own tour using his book as a guide. It is amazing how many people you see in Europe carting around his books!!

When the train arrived, we boarded and found that David and Linda from our group were already on it – they had walked to a different station to board. The ride to Versailles was about 40 minutes long and then we had a 10 minute walk to the entrance.

Versailles it absolutely massive. Louis XIV built it as his country hunting lodge. He continued to expand it until it became overwhelmingly large. At that point, he decided he needed to build another home away from his vacation home and built another mansion a little further back on the property. His wife, Marie Antoinette, also decided she needed another home and built a smaller place not far from her husbands place. She also decided that she needed to get closer to the people at times and built a 12 building farming village on the property. The gardens are beautiful and there are numerous fountains of different sizes that only run on the weekends and they play accompanying music.

My favorite part of Versailles, besides the gardens and fountains, was the farming village. They have maintained the exteriors of the buildings, you can’t go inside any of them, and the gardens around the buildings have been maintained, including the vegetable gardens and vineyards. The main farm building has quite a bit of livestock including, cows, horses, sheep, pigs, rabbits and chickens.



We arrived at Versailles at around 9am and stayed until after 4pm. It was a beautiful day and not too hot. This is where we met our first rude Parisian. They have a Petit Train that runs throughout the grounds and our all encompassing ticket included transportation on this train. We stopped at a loading point and asked the driver if he went to a certain area of the grounds that we wanted to visit. He told us that he did not go there. I asked him if we could catch a different train at that stop that would get us there and he informed me that “No, You can walk!!” Soooooo, we took off walking. As we arrived at our destination, up drives the same gentleman we had spoken to in his train. I was not too pleased. We finished our sightseeing in that area and got in line to at least catch the train back to the castle. Who drives up but the same man. We showed him our tickets and he refused to accept them, said we had to purchase additional ride tickets from him at 3.50€ each. After we got off the train, we asked another employee of Versailles if our tickets covered riding the train and we were told that yes they did cover it. We were seeing red by this time but there wasn’t much we could do about it. We thought about asking for our money back but the lines to talk to anyone were extremely long and not worth the small amount we had paid. Oh well!!

Got back to our hotel and ran into some of the others that were in our tour group and made arrangements to join them for dinner later. We walked to a recommended restaurant and had a terrific but somewhat expensive meal. Paul and I opted out of dessert and went to see if we could find a pastry shop open. Most places are closed on Sundays, or only open half a day, and quite a few are also closed on Mondays so we didn’t have any luck finding some pastry. Our dinner, though expensive, had been somewhat skimpy so we were both still a little hungry. We decided to just go to sleep so we wouldn’t know we were hungry.