Day 9: Mirrors inside the Palace and smoke and mirrors outside...

Not much sleep at all for me and Emily. Emily was sick and was up until 4:30-5am. I was up until about 4am because Emily was up. She was still a trooper and we still got up and out of the door at 9:30am. At every apartment we find the closest coffee shop and I get coffee for the crew in the morning. We’ve had to ‘adjust’ in Paris, because all of their coffee is in itty bitty tiny cups. Their ‘Americano’, which is supposed to be ‘big’, is in a tiny cup. But it’s super strong, so Sherri dilutes and doctors it (sorry pure coffee people) for us.  So, with coffee in us and not much sleep, we trekked out.

On the way to the train station, we stopped at a local bakery and got a baguette; partially because it smelled good and partially so we could walk around Paris with a baguette like the locals. Oh, and it's fun to say "baguette." We also got a quiche and some freshly squeezed orange juice. Yum!  We hopped on the train to Versailles and followed the throngs of people to the Palace of Versailles, which is the second-most visited monument in France. Stay tuned to find out what the first-most visited monument is (it’s not the Eiffel Tower!); you can be sure that the Hummels will be there soon!

Baguette!

So many yummy bakeries around here!

I know I’ve talked about pre-purchasing tickets to the different sites and attractions, but it couldn’t have been more important than at the Palace of Versailles. There was easily a two to three-hour line to get tickets, and probably around 700 people in line in the baking sun. For people that already had tickets, the line was less than five minutes. Yay for planning! Also, get your tickets from the official site. We ran into some folks from Texas that said, “we have to know, how did you do that? We bought ‘skip the line’ tickets and we still had to wait in that massive line.” Turns out they bought their tickets on some third-party site and they were not at all able to skip the line. 

The Palace was just simply indescribable. Just when I think it can’t be more over the top, it’s more over the top. These folks must’ve had a bunch of time and money on their hands, because the Palace is HUGE and every single room is beyond extravagant. How did they even keep track or name the rooms??!  “Honey, I’ll be in the 76th room of the west wing of the fifth quadrant of the secondary residence…”  Carvings, detail, gold,… everywhere you look. We probably toured around 40 rooms in the Palace, which means we barely covered 5% of the place. The Hall of Mirrors was especially stunning. This is where the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919. There are 357 mirrors in the hall, so we had to keep track of 1074 daughters. 

 

We also toured the gardens. Again, completely beautiful, and completely over-the-top. We saw one guy trimming the small ball at the top of a shaped tree with tiny scissors. Think Mr. Miyagi but with about 100 more bonsai trees left to trim in just that one area of the garden! 

After touring the Palace and the gardens for a couple hours, we decided to grab some lunch at a restaurant nearby. Being the American tourists we are, we went to an “American” place that had all of their burgers and sandwiches named after 80s/90s movies and TV characters, such as Mardy (sic) McFly, Axel Foley, and Phoebe Boufay (sic). I was completely confused because, instead of French Fries (which, ok, I get it, they are probably not French…but they are very popular in America) they served hash browns. And very bad hash browns at that. Why not French fries? I was so confused. Anyway, it was a decent lunch and we enjoyed sitting outside with the awesome weather we are having here.

Remember, you must have beer with dinner lunch!

Lunch at an aptly named restaurant.

Yummy burger with yucky hash browns.

We spent the rest of the day enjoying the gardens. It was like the hedge maze in The Shining, but times 400, as they cover 800 hectares of land. Do you know how much a hectare is? I didn’t either, but I do now. It’s 10,000 sq meters. So, the gardens cover 8 million square meters (that’s 3 square miles to you non-metric folks). There are many beautiful flowers, fountains, plants, and trees, and we even got to see a couple of water shows (think Bellagio, but 1/50th of the scale). 

 

Not a postcard. Looks like one. But not a postcard.

After we left the Palace, we were headed back to the Metro and we saw this gentleman painting these amazing scenes of Paris. Eiffel Tower, Palace of Versailles, and beautiful scenes of boats in the River Seine. We got pretty caught up in the moment and almost snap-purchased two of them for €70.  That’s about $80! Sherri, being the family skeptic, slowed us down a bit to look over the situation and we realized that 1) he had a work ‘in progress’ but he wasn’t actually painting on that half-done one 2) he kept misting a finished one with water and running a brush over it, but not really painting 3) his paints were half dry 4) the texture on his ‘original paintings’ was the same and upon detailed inspection did not look like brush strokes.  He did have paint on his jeans and shirt, which was a nice touch, but ultimately we determined this was a ruse and saved ourselves €70. We could be wrong here....you never know!

We hit a local grocery store on our way back for PB&J supplies for dinner. We got to our place at around 8am (early!), had dinner, and did some laundry. Another awesome day in Paris!