Day 30 - Paris

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Had one of our earlier starts of the trip this morning although it still really wasn't that early as we took the train to Versailles. It was peak hour and probably slightly less hectic than London's trains but still very busy.

The train ride to Versailles took about 40 minutes with a changeover in between. As far as I could understand, Versailles is basically a town on the outskirts of Paris that basically exists around this enormous Palace and without the Palace there would be no reason going there.

The palace itself was built about 500 years ago by King Louis XIV and became the centre of Paris after he moved away from the royal family in Paris. It is probably more famous for when King Louis XVI lived there and his wife Marie Antoinette as he built her another estate so she could live there as she was annoying him. She kept giving him daughters when all he wanted was a son, eventually he had he killed!

When we got to the ticket booth they told us that it would take about 5 hours to get through which we both thought was crazy. At first we went through the palace which was mainly heaps of different rooms where they would have certain events, etc and like the Louvre, all the ceilings were painted with amazing artwork. The best room was the room of mirrors which is pretty self explanatory for what is in there, I also liked the old fashioned billiards table that they used to use.

The palace took about an hour and we thought how could that take five hours, that was until we had a good look at the gardens where all of the other estates are. This made up another three hours and it could have been a lot more. Basically they are now public gardens but are still part of the palace and have a big water canal in the centre. We walked for a good four hours and deserved a break so we had a snack in the cafe where we shared a chocolate eclair. The day before I saw some in the window at a sweets shop and from afar it looked like they were chocolate covered sausages and I stupidly said to Lauren "geez what will they think of next" and then realised that they weren't actually sausages!

We took the train back to the city and didn't have much planned for the afternoon as we weren't sure how long Versailles would take. We had a look around at some shops and I think I've seen enough sports/shoes shops to last me a lifetime and they all are almost exactly the same. As it was our one month anniversary, I bought Lauren a present from one of her favourite stores Hermes. The funny thing was that as we walked in, the shop assistants took one look at us and thought we didn't really fit into their clientele and couldn't be bothered talking to us. So Lauren asked for help and once they knew they were going to get a sale, all of a sudden we were treated like royalty.

Back to the hotel for a rest and then out for dinner with a familiar face. JefF is in France looking at horses at the moment and took us out for dinner so it was nice to see someone familiar as we haven't really had interaction with anyone on the trip apart from Rick and Mahla last week. During the day Lauren had said that Jeff had already picked the place and I thought it was another one of Tony Leonard's pubs of the week (sorry only a few people will get that joke), but the food was great and we had a good time.

Back to the hotel and have a bit to do tomorrow as we're going for a tour of Roland Garros and we have a few things to do at night as its our last night in Paris.

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