Let Them Eat Cake

Well, we may have not eaten cake, but we sure did eat alot of cookies during my family's two week stay here! We also visited the main courting grounds of the woman who may have uttered those infamous words.

Versailles.

I've been to Versailles six times now and I'm still not bored of it! I love it there! It's always breath taking and you never run out of things to see or places to explore in the chateau.
Even though it was my sixth visit there, it was my first time to actually make it to the outer areas of the grounds that include Trinanon, Le Petit Trinanon and Marie Antoinette's Farm. I insisted that we rent a golf cart and drive down to see those areas before we actually took the tour of the main chateau. I knew if we did the main tour first, we'd be too tired to make it to the rest. Also, by foot it would take an hour to walk to the mini-chateaux and farm; thus why we rented the golf cart.

You had to be over 24 and have a valid drivers license to be the lucky one behind the wheel. None of us met all of those recuirments, my sister, kim and I all being under 22 and my dad not having a drives license. Here's where the language barrier comes in handy, they failed to notice the bold, capped letters across my dad's ID saying, "NOT A VALID DRIVERS LICENSE." So, we zoomed off at four miles an hour down the "corn maze-esk" gardens of Versailles to find Marie Antoinette's favorite country escape from court.

On the way, we drove past a man-made canal that is in the center of the Versailles gardens, where tons of people were strolling by, laying leisurely on the grass, riding bikes, walking their dogs and even rowing row boats across the lake. A perfect way to spend a warm, spring afternoon in gardens that were started in 1661 and took forty years to come to their full fruition.

Trinanon and Le Petit Trinanon were both built for favorite women of the French kings. Marie Antoinette had control over both of them at one point, and were one of her favorite places to be outside of the main Cheateau. They are still shown under the style she had them decorated and are beautiful. They're both way smaller than the main chateau and it gives them more of an intimate feel, giving the viewer a more personal insight to life back then. It was fun to walk through the smaller, average size door frames (which are tiny compared to our current door frames), to examine the smaller rooms and be able to imagine people actually spending time in them, living their lives.

We didn't make it to Marie's farm because we had already surpassed our hour time frame for the golf cart, so we scurried off to return it.

After dropping it off, we proceeded to do the main tour. Like always, there was another wing to the chateau added on to the tour that I hadn't seen yet, which was a pleasant surprise. We ended up having to rush through though, because it was cram packed with tour groups.

It was a perfect visit to Versailles with the clan. We had a blast driving through the gardens, exploring the past and enjoying the early spring sunshine. I plan on going back in the next two weeks with my fiance and taking one of those lovely boat rides.