Versailles

Well Saturday dawned, in all its heat and four of us were off to Versailles for the day. We were to meet at 10.30am on the lawn outside the residence. By 11am we got the shits and knocked on the Americans door, he wasn’t awake – 5 minutes later we were off!
Getting the train there was pretty easy, but on arrival we realised how many tourists there were, it was so busy and there was a queue to get tickets and then another queue to get in to the palace. We decided to skip the palace and go straight to the gardens. Everything is normally free for students studying in France which is great! Except at Versailles on weekends when they have the Grand Eaux Musicals (musical fountains) so we had to pay 6 euro to get in. Totally worth it – the gardens are absolutely gorgeous and are on a scale that is so huge you can’t appreciate it in the photos, no wonder they bankrupted the country! Here are a few photos...





The best part of the whole day was sitting down on the grass near the Grand Canal eating lunch or ice-cream! There weren’t as many tourists and there were lots of French families sitting having picnics on the canal’s banks, hiring boats to paddle in the Grand Canal and going for bike rides and walks with their families



At 3.30pm the ‘fountain show’ was due to start. We got good seats really, dangling our feet into the water, ready for a great fountain show and were sorely disappointed. Basically all they did was turn the fountains on and play classical music through the speakers. If the gardens were not so impressive I would have been sorely dissatisfied. I am however very keen to return to the Grand Eaux Nocturne (fountains, music & lights), from the photos on display it looks spectacular. We bailed form Versailles at about 4pm, having spent about 4 hrs walking around and we didn’t even go into the Palace! You can see how tourists get overwhelmed with trying to fit it all in!