Versailles

Drove over to the Chateau de Versailles.  We parked on a side street, almost across the street from the pay lot in front of the palace.  Nancy waited in line while I bought tickets.  I had to walk through a labyrinth made of chairs and couches, which seemed oddly improvised given that it is one of the most visited places on Earth.  I used a machine to buy tickets; this is one of the only machines I was able to buy anything from in France with my American credit card with a stripe.

It is absolutely impressive and is another place that is not done justice by photos, at least not ones I can take.

I think I read somewhere that it took 1/2 of France's annual GDP at that time to build.  On the other hand, that money might have been wasted some other way.  For what it is worth, it has been open to the public for about half of its existence.

It only took about an hour to tour the palace.  It's very large but there is a lot of it that is not exposed to the public.  Little things such as the following made us wish we had sprung extra for the navigation devices (or downloaded any of the various podcasts available for free):

Yikes.  There is a pretty detailed description of what this all is on wikipedia, and from what I understand there were also other bizarre facets of royal hygiene that involved assistance from the Court.

Finagle that we didn't use

Interestingly, we noticed as we exited Versailles there was an unmanned open gate that could be a perfectly easy way to sneak in without paying.  I have no idea if this is usually guarded or not.  I don't endorse this kind of behavior but here is a picture of it for reference purposes.



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