Sunday, December 16, 2012

Versailles

Hello again! Yes, it has been a while. Blogger told me I had too many pictures and I could not upload anymore. How horrible right?! What is a blog post without pictures. Well, I finally figured it out (just uploaded to my google + account) and we are moving forward. I know this blog has turned into Emily and Eric's trip to Europe, but I determined to get our whole trip documented on here! If anyone reading it is ready for some new content, I am sorry! I am trying to get caught up. I don't want to just skip things. Life has been busy... I hope to one day be posting normally again!

If you remember where we left off, we spent three nights in Paris and on the fourth day, we got our rental car and headed out of Paris. Our rental as supposed to be an automatic, but they gave us a manual. Eric does know how to drive one, but was a little rusty. Let's just say getting out of Paris that morning was a little bit stressful. I really wasn't sure we were going to recover from that one! But we did! We arrived at Versailles (about 45 minutes outside of Paris) around 10 am. Luckily the line was not bad to get tickets and enter, which is what I was worried about. Versailles was huge!


 















 The Hall of Mirrors - where the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Honestly, we did not enjoy the inside of the palace very much. It was overcrowded with tour groups who really made the experience very unenjoyable. They would just stop and block your way and made it very stressful. We hurried through the palace and moved on to touring the grounds, which was much better.


 The gardens surrounding Versailles are massive. 


 The Grand Trianon - a small palace that was built so the royalty would have somewhere to retreat when the main palace became too busy.




 Marie Antoinette's Domain - she built this little hamlet as a personal retreat during her years of reign at Versailles.

 We really enjoyed this area. The little houses were so cute.


Of course we had to take a picture of the cows.

Overall, we enjoyed Versailles, but as you will see in upcoming posts, we saw some smaller, but much more interesting, less crowded, and equally or more beautiful chateaus. Versailles is massive, it wins in that category, but the chateaux of the Loire Valley certainly do rival it.

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