Today was not like that. At all. We successfully navigated the Paris RER commuter line (got on the right train going out to Versaille, got on the right train coming back from Versaille - the first time!) with nary a hitch. Ok a tiny hitch - the rail map led us to a RER station that had not ticket machines. We stopped a guy coming out of the train station who was very helpful despite the language barrier. We had to buy tickets to Versailles at the Metro station across the street from where we were.
Otherwise, everything went perfectly. A little hard to mess it up when Versailles is the last stop on the line, but the potential for ending up somewhere north of Paris by mistake was huge.
We arrived at about 9:30 a.m. The tourism office said it should take about 5 hours to do everything. And our museum pass (or maybe just an entry ticket) got us a free audio guide. The audio guide was a little flaky and took a little getting used to.
All the people who were missing from the 2nd and 0th floors at the Louvre showed up at Versaille. In theory this is no longer peak season. The Hall of Mirrors kinda looked like this:
The good news is that the crowd mostly flowed and moved along. Well at the zombie-shuffle agonizing museum-viewing pace.
The Royal Chapel is also pretty spectacular:
We were through the royal apartments in about 2 hours. The whole other chunk of the palace is under reconstruction, which was a little disappointing. So we went to lunch. "Angelina" is the name of the chain that seems to populate Paris museum food services. The server said it's a very old and well known tea house in France, known for its chocolates. Which we've noticed. Today's treat: chocolate eclair. Yummmmm.....
After lunch we finished up whatever we had left in the Chateau. Out in the courtyard was a seriously long line for the "Petit Train" - in theory, for 7.5 euros, it makes 4 stops: at the Grande Triannon, the Petite Triannon, the Grande Canal, then back at the Chateau. The maps of the estate didn't make it easy to figure out the actual distances between these things. We waited probably a half hour to get on this train to take us to the first stop (Grande Triannon), a 10 minutes train ride.
Here's the royal summer "I want to be alone" cottage:
We saw the line waiting for the train to the next stop. It was long. And when the train showed up, the line never shortened. I couldn't see how this train could keep up with the volume of people on the estate. We saw people on segways (I wish I had thought of that) and people with rented golf carts. I wanted to hitch a ride with one of them.
Turns out the next stop (Marie Antoinette's "get away" cottage was literallly a 10 minute walk away. What was the point of waiting 1/2 hour for a train to drive up the street? We walked it. Here's Marie's "get away" cottage:
It's now getting close to 3:30 - we'd been on the move about 6 hours. That seems to be my limit - I sat on a bench while Andy wandered around the grounds of the Petite Triannon and got nasty looks from a swan.
The line for the train magically still had not gotten any better. Checking the map, we just decided to walk to the Grand Canal:
Then we walked back up to the Chateau via the gardens. Have to admit, the gardens were a bit of a disappointment. Hardly any flowers at all. Only one fountain on at a time. This is the most exciting flower I saw:
And one last pretty view (it was this fountain's turn to be on):
Then we walked back to the train station, got on the correct train and arrived back in Paris 30 minutes later.
And no bathroom story! Well except for the fact that on the way out the bathroom was all the way down a huge hill going in the wrong direction away from the exit, which would have meant climbing all the way back UP the hill...never mind.
We've finally noticed that cafes that call themselves "restaurant" have better (and more expensive) food than "brasseries". Brasserie food is fine; it's just that it's basically the same food we can get in the US. What's the point of that? So now we're on the hunt for "restaurants".
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a pastry/gelato shop. Gelato is always the right choice. I got three different kinds of chocolate squished into one cup: Dark chocolate, regular chocolate, and "amarino" (almaretto). YUUUUUMMMMMMM.....
Tomorrow is a relatively easy day. Tentatively: Notre Dame, Sacre Coeure and the Pantheon.
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