Excursion to Versailles Palace

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On 25 June, we got up and had breakfast at the same time as the previous day and left for Versailles Palace at 9 o’clock. We took the overground train from Austerlitz. The SNCF over ground train offered double decker cars. The train for Versailles Rive Gauche was full. As anticipated, all of the passengers including group of young children headed for Versailles Palace.



Although we had valid museum passes, we weren’t offered the priority entry and had to join a long, long queue for the palace. Versailles Palace is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Paris, receiving more than 3-4 million visitors per year. However, there was only one entry for the palace for individual visitors. The staff were checking whether the people were carrying the valid tickets, as well as the contents in the handbags and clothes at one place. My father and I wanted to go to the toilet. We had waited nearly two hours, but were still long way ahead for the entry. For those reasons, we decided not to go to the palace but explore the garden. Having read the information in French and English on the electronic board, we understood that the museum pass was not valid for the garden with fountain & musical shows, which sessions were run in the morning and afternoon. It was sunny and warm day, so we paid for the garden and decided to explore the massive grounds of Versailles. As it was lunch time, we stopped at one of the restaurants to have lunch.



We decided to head for Petit Trianon, where Marie-Antoinette spent her private life. The museum pass was valid for the entry for Petit Trianon. After going through the security point, we were invited to the principal rooms, e.g. Vestibule, drawing room, mirror room, bedchamber, and dining room. I saw several portraits of Marie-Antoinete and her children, which I had seen on the biographies of herself. All of the rooms had pretty feminine style decorations, furniture with floral patterns, music instruments, and large windows overlooking the gardens.



We needed to go to the toilet before exploring the grounds of Petit Trianon. However, there wasn’t a toilet in the garden. We had to leave the building, and join the queue for the entry again. The toilet was located near the entrance for the house. Like other toilets on the grounds of Versailles Palace, there were only two toilet rooms, so my mother and I had to wait more than 30 minutes for the lady’s toilet. The toilet room wasn’t very tidy either.



Afterwards, we started strolling through the grounds of Petit Trianon. The layout of the grounds looked similar to English garden. It contained winding paths, pond with winding brooks and water plants, garden ornaments like temple grotto and wooden bridges. We could see some fascinating houses on the northwest directions. Fascinating houses referred to the Queen’s hamlet, and they were designed for Marie Antoinette. We saw a group of fantasy looking houses with the cracked walls, thatched rooftops, wooden gallery festooned with geraniums and wall flowers. Those country houses had vegetable gardens and there were gardeners looking after plants and wooden houses. It was even more intriguing to see the adjacent farmland and a wide variety of animals, e.g. rabbits, goats, cows, ducks, male peacock. My mother sketched one of the cottages with vegetable garden. She said, “I would spend all day on sketching if I had been brought in the morning.”



After that, we decided to return the main grounds of Versailles Palace. We were asked to show the tickets for the garden. Fountains were on display when we came back and they looked spectacular with ground buildings statues, and greens, and beautiful layout of the garden. We assumed that running those fountains and its maintenance cost a lot of money, and it was a little surprise that we were charged with the entry for the garden.



We popped in the gift shop. Compared to the large gift shops in Louvre, the gift shop at Versailles was relatively small and there were more feminine goods than items for boys and gentlemen. There were some English books, but they were rather expensive.

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