Una mesa para seis - Table for Six: Paris Trip Day 5

On Sunday April 5th, we set off for Versailles. I purchased the Versailles passports from the official website at €25 each, the kids were free. This would give us access to all the palaces including the fountain show in the gardens. Although the children can enter the palaces for free, they do have to pay to enter the gardens during the musical fountain shows, so we had to pay an extra €7 for each child over 6 years old.

The plan was to leave early enough to arrive at the entrance by 9am in order to beat the crowds. Unfortunately we missed the train we had planned to catch, and had to wait another 20min at the station for the next train. The RER to Versailles was full of tourists, there wasn't even a place to sit. So over 500 tourists poured out of the train and arrived at the palace at the same time as we did, it was around 9:45am at this point. When we arrived at the palace entrance, there was already a pretty long line of people with tickets waiting to get through security. The problem was, that there was no one doing crowd control, even though there were security guards and Versailles staff everywhere. The line was a mess, people didn't know where the end of the line was, so they just kept joining the line wherever they could. The line kept getting wider instead of longer, so the people who were already in line were getting angry as newcomers tried to bud in. As the chaos and confusion began to mount, finally one of the security guards decided it was time to intervene and put some order into the line. He randomly decided how to separate the crowd into thinner lines, making many tourists angry as they saw themselves all of a sudden much farther from the entrance then before.

We waited close to 2 hours in this crazy line up that never seemed to end. At least it wasn't raining, but it wasn't that warm and the kids were complaining about the cold. Fortunately we had brought sandwiches and lots of snacks, so we could keep the kids distracted with food. We were very disappointed in the Versailles staff who seemed to be doing nothing while all this was going on. At least there should have been some barriers so that people would no where to go. I'm sure it's not the first time a large crowd of people have arrived at Versailles at the same time, you would think that they would have been better organized :(

Once we got past the security check point, we made our way into the King's Grand Apartments. It was crowded inside, but not too difficult to get around. It's definitely a palace like no other in the world. Once you see the extravagance and excess that fills each room, it's not hard to imagine why the French Revolution started. I was really amazed by the paintings on the ceilings. Why the kings needed to have such ornate ceilings, I don´t know. I found it kind of annoying to have to tilt my head backwards all the time to admire the ceilings.

As impressive as the main palace is, the gardens are like a whole other world. Just walking to the Grand Trianon took us almost 40 minutes. The Grand Trianon is an amazing palace as well and not as busy. We didn't have time to visit Marie Antoinette's estate because we had to make out way back to the main gardens for the musical fountain show that started at 3:30pm. We walked around for 1.5 hours, but I think that we only managed to see about a quarter of the gardens. By 5pm, we decided to call it quits. If we had a little more time, and if the weather was nicer, I think that it would have been fun to spend a day just visiting the gardens of Versailles. It is free to enter the gardens as long as it's not during the musical fountain show.