Paris Day 2 Versailles

Where do I begin? To tell the story of the longest most tiring, strenuous and tedious day of tourism that I've ever known. Though I should preface the above by saying it was well worth it and Versailles remains a must see feature. But let me put the pain to bed while I'm still feeling it now that I'm back in our apartment with my feet up and a cool breeze wafting through. The queuing to get in was a matter of standing in the sun on hard cobblestones for 90 minutes. This was much worse than we expected, which meant that we weren't as prepared as we might have been. The catch-22 involved here is that I carried enough water for us to cope, which meant standing/shuffling up and down the snaked line bearing the weight of the water and our other survival paraphernalia. All the while rotating and rearranging hats and bags to keep things out of the sun. While that was the worst of it, for the rest of the day we had very few places to sit and rest. We even had to stand to eat/drink from the internal cafe. Rant over, I'm glad we went and just a little chastened that I'm getting old enough that doing these things can hurt quite a lot. We got to Versailles by taking a Metro subway train to Montparnasse and then buying return tickets on a suburban train to Versailles Chantiers. From there we walked for 15 minutes through the town of Versailles before seeing our doom in the huge queue to get through security scanning. At least we hadn't needed to first queue for tickets. Once inside, perhaps because of the pace of the scanning, there was no crowding although Lee did immediately have to queue for a toilet. The way it works at Versailles is that you enter through the Chateau (Palace really). This directs you through a sequence of rooms, there are toilets, a cafe, a restaurant and two shops. You can leave the room sequence in several places to go out to the gardens. The chateau is much like similar royal palaces/apartments around Europe but with a few twists. Some parts are simply bigger/better, e.g. the famed Hall of Mirrors. Others had interrupted histories because of the Revolutions plural and restoration of the monarchy. Some spaces had been overtaken by Napoleons (I & III). As I've written before, being able to see and compare these across Europe has been the unexpected payoff of this holiday. While the palace is itself the feature, it became a museum since the revolution so there is a lot of art about too. So, once again we were able to see works of artists who we don't see in art history books. Ditto for avenues of busts of writers, artists, composers etc and see which were enough noted in the past, all lined up and some familiar and many not. After walking through the chateau we queued with quite some patience, in the sun again, for a very bumpy little pseudo-train to take us to two auxiliary buildings - the Grand Trianon and the Petit Trianon. Like lesser palaces these still had elements of grandeur but had open vistas and the feel of seaside villas, albeit with no beach, just more sculptured gardens. At this point we were very tired and after queuing again for the return little train ride we didn't have the energy to stop at The Grand Canal. This was clearly very popular and being outside the central gardens is available to all, much like Kings Park or the Domain. The mini train is ticket controlled and was thus able to get us back in the grounds. I suspect that if we hadn't had to queue so much then we would have managed to walk more of the main gardens and its fountains. Timing was an issue for that as they block it off for separately ticketed water fountain shows. It had been blocked as we waited for the train. Thus, this is what we lost from being in the long entry queue. But as we were too exhausted we just walked out the gates and headed off through Versailles town for the train station. We had left the apartment at 8:45 and were back at 18:30.