At Last, Versailles

I apologize in advance for what is going to be a very pic-heavy post.  We went a bit crazy with the camera at the Louvre and Versailles, which in retrospect is pretty difficult to avoid.

But we’ll try to make it as entertaining as possible.  Are you sitting comfortably?  Is the lighting just right?  No, ok, I’ll wait.

All right.  Do you have a cold beer or tasty glass of wine in hand?

All right, let’s roll.

The Louvre, Take Two

Wednesday we visited the Louvre again, and this time we felt like we knew what we were doing.  Sort of.  This time we had decided to get a stroller, which the museum kindly provides for free.  The staff wasn’t too happy about me carrying the boy around on my shoulders the last time, and it was tough lugging him around in my arms for two hours, so the stroller seemed a no-brainer.

We jumped into line at 9:30 and immediately noticed that it was much longer than on our previous visit.  And it was a hell of a lot hotter.  It was easy to entertain Braeden, though, as we just kept sending him back to the reflecting pools to get his hands wet and come back to rub it all over our legs to “cool us off”.

There was also a robot cleaning the Pyramid, which was interesting to watch, and it led to a bunch of questions from the boy that were fun to answer.  For a brief and annoyingly shaky video of the robot you can check out my Instagram feed, @nathanblew.

Once we got into the museum we headed directly for the Roman and Greek sculpture rooms, which Braeden had asked to see first thing.

If you read our previous post on our first visit to the Louvre, you may recall that we had a little difficulty with the map.  A tad, as famously described by Elaine in Airplane II.

You saw Airplane II, right?  No, it wasn’t really that good, but it was still an Airplane movie and…

Wait, you’ve never seen Airplane?  You’re kidding.  All right, sorry everyone, but we’re going to have to wait until they’ve watched Airplane.  Go ahead.  It’s on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime or Microsoft Video or Sling or something.  Or maybe your neighbor has it on VHS.  Anyway, watch it.  Now.  We’ll wait.

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Ok, we’re back.  Now you’ll find you suddenly get way more of your friends’ movie references.  No more laughing and pretending, hoping against hope that no one will find out you’re a big phony.  You’re welcome.

So where were we?  Oh, yes, we couldn’t find our way around the Louvre.  Let’s just say it was deja vu all over again with the map, but this time we just went with the flow.

It’s possible that the map sucks, or that it’s very difficult to design a good map for a building as large and complex as the Louvre.

It’s also possible that we’re morons, but we’re going to avert our gaze from that possibility for a moment and move on.  We have feelings, you know.

Anyway, we stumbled around for a while and eventually came upon sculptures that Braeden found interesting, and we took our time.  We saw Winged Victory yet again, and I enjoyed it even more than the first time we saw it.  I think that one’s going to stick with me for awhile.  This time it was the detail in her wings that blew me away.

After we had spent time leisurely exploring some of the sculpture rooms I remembered that I wanted to check out the Spanish painters wing to see what they had on display for Goya and El Greco.

I was hoping to see Saturn Devouring His Son but apparently it’s in a museum in Spain.  It’s just as well because I don’t think it would have been a good idea for the boy to take that in, and by that time I didn’t have the energy to create a diversion so J and I could see the painting without the boy seeing it.  So now we’ll just have to find it in Spain.

Before leaving Braeden wanted to see the Sphinx one last time.  It’s apparently one of the largest Sphinxes you can see outside of Egypt, and it captured the boy’s imagination.  He’d been talking about it all week and we would have suffered the “Torture Of A Thousand Daddy Please’s” if we didn’t see it one last time.

It took a while but we found it on our own, which was cause for high-fives and celebration.  Braeden didn’t want to get too close to the Sphinx, but he seemed content to inspect it from fifteen feet away.  He even got a little nervous when Mommy got in close for a photo, which was strangely adorable.

Then we left and headed back to the apartment.  We probably won’t get back to the Louvre on this trip, but we’re feeling pretty happy that we saw things we wanted to see and quite a bit of the unexpected.

Day Trip to Versailles

After much planning, reading, and a few false starts on other days, we finally got to Versailles on Thursday.  It was everything we heard it would be, and even as we were leaving, Braeden was asking, “Mommy, when can we come back to Bursailles?”

It was that good.

First, we would like to thank our friends Jamie and Ralph again for some great advice.  At their suggestion we booked the “King’s Apartment Tour” at 10:15 am, which not only gives you a behind-the-scenes view of some of the Kings’ (yes, that’s multiple kings) private rooms, which was a wonderful escape from the bustle and chaos of the rest of the palace, but it got us past the enormous security line at the general admission gate.  Score.  Big, big, score.

Our guide, Isabelle, was a delightful, birdlike Frenchwoman who obviously loved her job and knew the palace inside and out.  The tour lasted about ninety minutes and we were taken through a dozen or more of the Louis’  (14th, 15th, and 16th) private rooms where they bathed, studied, slept, ate, consulted with advisors, and probably “Showed the 50 States” to a fair number of ladies before there were any States, if you know what I mean.

I carried Braeden through much of it in an effort to keep him from getting too worn out too early, and I ended up wearing myself out.  The mile walk from the train station with him on my shoulders and then 90 minutes of holding him was tougher than I thought it would be, and by the time we were finished with the tour I was ready to sit down and eat something French.

Since the guided tour dropped us off right at the entrance to the “rooms of state” and the famous Hall of Mirrors, we decided to suck it up and try to see those rooms and the Hall before resting.

Compared to the peace and quiet of the private tour, the rest of the palace was positively chaotic.  I’ve never actually seen cattle being moved from pen to pen at auction, but my Yankee brain imagines that the rooms of Versailles were very much like it.

Hordes of tourists jammed shoulder-to-shoulder shuffled between rooms.  We moved as quickly as possible, as we were suffering from Opulent Room Fatigue and wanted to get to Louis 15th’s bedchamber and the Hall, but even though we were moving fast the pure richness of the rooms still struck us.

The private apartments we viewed on the guided tour were decorated as lavishly as rooms we’d seen in some Newport mansions.  These rooms, however, were something new.

I’m almost certain that the mob that marched from Paris to Versailles at the start of the Revolution was actually just a happy-go-lucky, peaceful, slightly starving group of Parisians that merely wanted to talk to Louis and Marie to see if they could convince the monarchs to throw them a bone.  Or some bread.  Or a banana-and-nutella crepe.  Anything.

But when the placid crowd got to Versailles, they looked around at the place, mouths agape,  and screamed, “WHAT THE F**K!  YOU HAVE GOLD ON THE WALLS?  AND WHY DO YOU NEED SO MANY FOUNTAINS, DUDE?!?”

Then they grabbed the king and queen and tossed them in prison for the crime of going way too heavy on the crystal, gold, and crushed red velvet when the rest of Paris was boiling shoe soles and rat whiskers for dinner.

You won’t find that particular version of history anywhere but here, by the way.  You’re welcome.

So when we finally reached the Hall of Mirrors it was all that and a bag of donuts, so to speak.  Words fail and photographs are poor, poor servants.

It was as if the gods had run down a hall decked with beautiful paintings and a gorgeous view, and then splashed liquid crystal and gold everywhere in some kind of celestially-sexy-water-pistol-fight.

I got you, Apollo!

No you didn’t, Artemis, you totally missed me!

You always lie when we play sexy-water-pistols!  I’m gonna tell Dad!

Go ahead, he always believes me anyway.  Ahahahahahaaa!

We lingered there in the Hall, with about 250 of our closest friends, for as long as we could, then we moved to the exit and on to the next part of our adventure, the Gardens.

At this point I desperately wanted to sit down, stop carrying the boy, and eat something.  The first cafe we went to had a line a quarter of a mile long.  Ok, not quite, but it was long enough for me to utter an expletive under my breath and look at the map for another food spot.

We moved a little farther away from the palace and found two kiosks:  one that was renting golf carts and another that was selling sandwiches.  Neither had much of a line, so we got some sandwiches and drinks, sat down on the steps in front of the palace, and ate while we admired the view of the Gardens stretching out before us, literally as far as the eye could see.

Then we rented a golf cart, fired it up, and toured the grounds.  I may have screamed “Yee-haw!” at the top of my lungs as we chugged off in the little cart.

The golf cart was a dream come true.  I didn’t have to carry the boy, we all could take a load off, and the cart even came with commentary in English that described the history of various spots we saw along the way.

We drove through much of the grounds, checked out Petite Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s home away from the palace, and stopped to explore a grove or two and some fountains.  It was a relaxing way to spend the rest of our visit and well worth the price of the rental.

Knowing that we still had a hike from the palace to the train station to deal with, we left Versailles when we felt we were nearly, but not quite, spent.  We bid farewell to a truly amazing place, walked back to the train station, and enjoyed the short ride back into Paris.

Once we were back in the city we scrapped our plans for a nice quiet dinner and and opted for a meal at Les Patios, where we washed the dusty fatigue of the day away with a few cocktails.  We let Braeden goof around the fountain in front of the Sorbonne for a bit, then went home and crashed hard.

Another Garden and The World’s Most Beautiful Department Store

Friday we headed out to Galeries Lafayette, which we heard was a pretty impressive department store.  It was, and I won’t even bother to describe it because it would be a bullshit exercise in futility.

Check out the pic below…

Mom shopped a little while I kept the boy entertained, and then we headed for Jardin des Tuileries, where we had heard there was a playground.

We spent some time at the playground where J had some breakfast, I had a Croque Monsieur, and the boy tore around like we gave him meth and Fun Dip for breakfast.

The Place de la Concorde, one of the largest public squares in Paris, was not far away, and there also happens to be a big-ass Ferris Wheel there, so we strolled over to check it out.

We bought some tickets, hopped on, and enjoyed the views.  Braeden has lately started insisting on snapping some pictures himself, so we let him go to town with the camera.  We were able to find one usable shot, which we included below.  I remember vividly my early experiments with a film camera in the early 80’s and I think I burned several dozen rolls of film before I even came close to getting a shot of something recognizable, so as usual he’s way ahead of me.

After the Ferris Wheel we took the bus home, grabbed a nap, had a quiet dinner, and called it a night.

Over the past couple of days we’ve spent hours on Skyscanner, AirBnB, and SNCF (France’s rail service) putting together the details for our next few months on the road.  We’re still waiting on confirmation for our lodgings in Mauritius, but our upcoming itinerary looks something like this:

Aug 3:  Leave Paris, 2 days in Caen to tour Normandy

Aug 5:  2 days in Saint-Aubin-de-Terragatte to check out Mont Saint-Michel

Aug 7:  2 weeks in Annecy

Aug 21:  2 weeks in Aix-en-Provence

Sept 2:  2 weeks in Antibes

Sept 16:  TGV back to Paris, fly out the next day to Mauritius

…and we’ll be in Mauritius until about November 18th.  The flight from Paris to Mauritius is nearly twelve hours, the longest any of us has flown before, so that will be, ummmm, interesting.  But the villa we have picked out in Mauritius (fingers crossed) is right on the beach, has beautiful water views, and has a pool, which the boy will love.

For now, however, we’re going to enjoy our last week or so in Paris.  It’s hard to believe we’ve been here for three weeks already, and we’re excited to see a few more sights and experience a little bit more of this beautiful city before we leave.