The palace was packed when we arrived, so we walked through the gardens and thought we'd start with Marie's place. It took us over 30 minutes to walk the gardens because it was soooooooooooooo huge! They were beautiful though and the fountains were all running (only run on Saturdays during certain months, so we were lucky to get to see this) and had classical music playing. It really felt royal and I could envision people hundreds of years ago just parading around back here. The best part is that certain areas of this garden are open to the public as a free park, so you'll see people just having a picnic and hanging out by the basins. Notice the rainbow in the one from the fountain spurt!
When we arrived at Marie's place, we had about 15 more minutes until they opened it, so we grabbed lunch at a little cafe they had there. There were multiple buildings and mini-palaces as part of her estate, along with tons of garden space. First up here was an enormous area much like a farm. This is where the servants would stay and they raised the animals and crops for eating. It's crazy how you really felt you were in the middle of the country out here! Supposedly she never really liked all the royalty stuff and attention and was more of a plain-jane and liked this country atmosphere she created here.
I'm not really sure why they called this whole area Marie Antoinette's estate, because some of these houses were used to house the King's mistress or for him and his buddies to come stay as a summer house. This first building here is where I believe he would have his mistress stay....nice little shack!
And this place was more where the King and his buddies would come to get away from things. Notice the flower beds here in front of the building-- these were changed DAILY to give the king a new view and aroma!
Here is the view looking out from that last building-- just perfectly landscaped gardens EVERYWHERE!
The interiors were okay, but not going to get too in-depth to show those! We were so pooped after all this walking that Dustin even agreed to pay for the tram to take us back to the Chateau and avoid the 30+ minute walk uphill! We toured the Chateau, but I must say overall was disappointing compared to the Gardens and Marie's place. Both of those had more of a WOW factor than the palace....partly because they only let you see such a small portion of this huge palace. That just drives me nuts when I see this huge palace with probably hundreds or even thousands of rooms and you get to see 15 rooms. Really?!? Anyways, here is a pic of the front of it (still can't fit the whole thing into the camera view) to try and give you a sense of the size...just mammoth!
And a view of us in back of a small section of the palace...
Here are a few shots of the interior. The art is just incredible that they have painted on the ceilings in some of these places!
This is the hall of mirrors which is where I think the treaty of Versailles was signed and many famous people have been in here.
We then caught the train back to Paris to the Eiffel Tower area and assembled food for a picnic. Went to a cheese store and bought 2 cheeses they recommended- didn't think either of them were that great! Went to a produce store and got THE BEST GRAPES I've ever tasted...would give anything to find grapes like this here! Went to a bakery to get some breads. Then to a wine store to get wine. We are getting to the Eiffel Tower and we see signs everywhere the alcohol is prohibitted and no one else is drinking....so we start getting scared that we will get in trouble, so we stop at a bench that is pretty un-scenic before you technically enter the park and decide to eat there.
After eating, we move closer to sit on the ground and just watch the Eiffel Tower- it lights up once it gets dark and then does special lighting effects starting at 9pm. Of course, just as we round the corner we see everyone sitting on the lawn with wine/beer hanging out...so we were nervous for no reason- just needed to get closer!
After watching for a bit, we then went to Arc de Triomphe again so we could see the views at night. It was really pretty up there, but we were too dumb to know how to take pics with our camera to get the night landscape to turn out. We met a really nice young man named John from Germany who had studied abroad in the US and stayed with a family in Oklahoma. He was so nice and took our email addresses and emailed us his pics that he took up there since he was a little better with the photography!
Then as descending the 50 million stairs to leave, I wiped out and fell down the stairs :( Embarrassing!!!! My hand was scraped up and bleeding, but not badly. My butt had a huge bruise on it the next day then and I couldn't sleep well cause hurt whenever I'd move. Oh well, overall it was a GREAT day of our trip!
