A Lot Like Life: Versailles

While Lindsey was here we took a day trip out to Versailles to see some French history.

The place is huge and despite the fact that we weren't quite sure where we were going when we got off the train it was easy to spot down the street with the huge gold gates. The place is pretty impressive (though I have to admit I'm still partial to Pitti Palace in Florence) and it had some beautifully decorated rooms. As a plus it had a spiral staircase that you walk up as you enter and we all know how I feel about spiral staircases. Bonus for Versailles.

There were beautiful chandeliers and painted ceilings and it was interesting to hear the story that went along with each ceiling/room and what it represented.

My favorite part of the actual palace was the hall of mirrors. It's a long corridor that connects the meeting/party rooms to the private bedrooms and is lined with mirrors and has elaborate chandeliers every couple feet down the whole length. It was pretty gorgeous.

The private rooms were also interesting. The middle picture is from the room where Marie Antoinette slept and in there was also the door in the back of the room where she fled through to escape capture.

After we went through the palace we ventured out to the gardens which I liked better than the palace itself. There were seemingly endless mazes of hedges as well as central ponds and fountains, one called the grand canal that had little boats available to rent and row around on.

We stopped for some lunch at little pizza stand in the garden and then continued on back toward Marie Antoinette's estate. The walk took us through some grassy fields for some dandelion wishing and cartwheeling!

The Marie Antoinette estate was smaller and simpler than the main palace, but was still very pretty.

The last section we went to was the best part. It was a tiny village made specifically for Marie Antoinette, called the Queens Hamlet, to remind her of the small Austrian villages she was used to back home. The grounds had winding paths and were more wild looking compared to the immaculately kept hedges near the main palace.

There were also benches and little bridges over streams everywhere, it was pretty cute.

The little village looked like it belonged in Disneyland, the full sized version of Storybookland or Pinnochio's house. They even had a small working farm with cows, pigs, geese, chickens, etc., along with a fishing pond.