While visiting France back in August we stopped in Versailles one day with the aim of going to see the Palace, which my daughter really wanted to see.
The main problem was that our plan was quite simple. We would just turn up and visit the palace - easy. But we were wrong. The palace gets so busy that you need to book in advance. So we decided to have a wander around Versailles instead and we pretty much struck gold !
We parked right by the palace which is where our walk started from. As can be seen the queues to get in were pretty long. The palace area was quite huge and we were quite surprised by the splendor of the buildings and how vast everything was.
Thats the royal chapel above, just next to the Palace. Look at that roof - I've never seen anything like that - they liked to splash the cash, thats for sure ! Thats the direction we took off in - we didnt know what we were looking for, but we just picked a direction and went for it.
We really were just following our nose with no real idea where we were going. We took a turn from the main street down this street with incredible box hedges all the way down !
That lead to a large park with all of these lovely horses in it, which was adjacent to the Palace grounds. We could see that there was something called the Trianon at the other end of the park, although we did not know what it was. However, we went there because we were looking for a toilet stop (and google maps said it had one) !
When we got to the Trianon we basically found out that it consisted of a number of other residences that the royal family of France used. Our daughter was quite upset that we didnt get into the Palace, so we decided to visit the Trianon instead as tickets were available.
And our luck was in ! The Trianon was great. They had these lovely residences you could visit and beautiful gardens all round. It was huge, and we spent a good few hours in there and didnt even get close to seeing it all.
We got to see a portrait of Marie Antoinette which kept our daughter happy !
The gardens were really impressive with so much to see.
Wandering around took as past many lovely sights, although I have to say the splendor was fairly sickening in places !
The sun came out with perfect timing while we were walking around the vast gardens.
We got treated to some pretty fancy shadows.
And even stumbled upon the Temple of Love !!!!
From there we walked to the Hameau de la Reine - which was a farm built for Marie Antionette - but in a very idyllic setting. This was no standard working farm of the time, but a special farm where she could pretend to play farmer and entertain her friends.
The farm was quite fairly tale looking - quite amazing to see. Our daughter had heard about it because she loves history and so she was delighted to see it which made up for not getting into the Palace. In fact, if we had gotten into the palace we would never have found the Trianon and got to see all of this.
A circular route through the grounds took us past this lovely grotto.
Looking at google maps I could see this massive man-made lake at one end in the shape of a huge cross so we made our way there to see it. I was rather stunned when we got to it. Its actually over in the grounds of the palace, but we could get to a view point for it from the Trianon. Its called the Grand Canal of Versailles and is part of the gardens of the Palace. It was massive. In the pic above you can only see about 30% of it. Now thats what I call a garden pond !!!
By this time we had already covered quite a few miles and so we started to head back to the car - passing this lovely floor on our way back out of the Trianon.
We went back past the horses.
And ended up back where we started just outside the palace. We'd walked quite a few miles by this time, so we were getting knackered, and headed for the car.
On the way out of the palace area I spotted this really cool fountain/tap. Just look at all the limescale that has built up over the years below the tap - how cool is that !
We really did enjoy our day considering we never got to see the intended target ! I would actually go as far to say it worked out better. We can always go back to see the Palace, knowing that we have to book in advance, but we would never have found out about the other things we saw, which were quite incredible, if we had planned it correctly and got into the palace in the first place ! So it all worked out great, and we also managed to put quite a few miles of walking under our belt at the same time. So all in all it was fantastic. We are still talking about going back for a weekend so we can visit the palace and some of the other sights, so hopefully we'll make that happen sometime over the next year !
