Paris 5 - Versailles, or the day that Simon's camera runs out of batteries far too early!

In our last day in France, we decided to go to Versailles and see the Sun King, Louis XIV's, famous royal court. We took the metro to the Paris Montparnasse station in the morning and, after losing Wayne and then finding him, we met up with Becca's family who were in town with her. They'd been visiting London for a few days and are now staying with her near the Eiffel Tower. We took a relatively quick train from Monparnasse to the Versailles station and then walked about a kilometer to get to the palace. At this point, the theme of our day began - waiting in lines. We stood in line for probably a little over an hour to get our tickets to get into the palace. Then, we went to the gardens and stood in line for 15 minutes to get those tickets.

The gardens, however, were really worth it. "They were just how you'd imagine the triwizard tournament from Harry Potter to be," said one Paul Michel. We toured the gardens for almost three hours and also saw the musical fountains. However, we were pretty upset that the overwhelming majority of the fountains or waterworks weren't on today. Only the dancing fountains were working.

After our long tours of the gardens, we went inside and walked around the palace. Walked is a liberal term here - there were multiple thousands of people trying to tour the palace and we were scrunched in amazingly tightly with what seemed like 50 Asian and Spanish tour groups all with headsets in their ears following the flag of their tour guide. It was so cramped that we could barely appreciate the Hall of Mirrors.
By the time we escaped the throngs in the palace, we were exhausted and quickly headed back to the train station to begin our journey home. We got back in time to go to the grocery store and prepare dinner (more tomato-mozzarella salad) and then watched The Netherlands edge out Uruguay to clinch a spot in the World Cup Final. We're off to Spain tomorrow morning on an early train and will be getting to Barcelona just before 8 so hopefully we'll be able to catch the Spain-Germany semi-final as well!

Cheers!

-Simon