Versailles

After disneyland we arrived late at the house at Orphin - about 40 mins south west of Paris - it was a gorgeous country house and slightly too flash for our rowdy children. We had a lovely breakfast in the sun and then headed to Versailles for the day.

As it was a public holiday, there was a decent queue to enter even though we had bought our tickets online - lucky we were well used to queues after Disneyland. There are worse places to queue though and we spent the time reading up on the history of Versailles - the sun king Louis XIV's great tribute to himself and la gloire de la France...

We lunched in the courtyard before doing the palace tour - the scale and grandeur is quite stunning and difficult to describe in a few words.

The piece de resistance is definitely La Galerie des Glaces - the Hall of Mirrors, a ballroom of incredible proportions and opulence:

view from the window

Then there are the gardens - we had recently watched the movie about the famous landscape architect Andre le Notre and the water features he designed, so it was quite interesting to see the layout and ponder the idea of order vs chaos - again the massive scale is hard to comprehend and we didn't even make it to Marie Antoinette's palace le Trianon. The gardens are open to the public so it is an amazing local treasure.

We wandered down through the gardens to Apollo's fountain and met Nath and her wider family there, including her parents, brother and niece - thanks Nath for giving us all the printouts to read about Versailles in English....

Then it was time to head back to the palace in the incredible light of late afternoon - Harvey winning the running race back to the palace steps. Then down to the lovely town of Versailles for a drink and home.

Harvey says:  Versailles is a palace of splendour. I would have thought that being a king, Louis XIV would have done something better for the people with the money instead of building himself the grandest palace in Europe.

Amelia says:  When we went to Versailles, the palace was like a little girl's dream. It certainly was my dream - I loved the glamorous gold gate.  When I saw the King's bed it looked like a girl's bed.

Zoe says: I loved the palace because it had really cool bedrooms - my favourite bedroom was the King's one because it had a four poster bed and I really like them. The gardens were very tidy and so massive.