France: Final Day, Versailles

13 May

From the journal:

After breakfast we strolled through the Tuileries and across to the Left Bank. Walked along by the river to the Pont Neuf, and then crossed back again, enjoying the wonderful views from the bridge. We stopped for coffee at La Corona, just one last time.

We noticed that we were now right next to the shop where my man had bought his much-loved brown hat, the one which was last seen slowly floating along the surface of the Canal Lateral a la Loire behind our vessel. Happily, the store had another one just the same, and so it was just a lovely happenstance that we went back there this morning and he was able to purchase another hat, identical to the first. To underscore how fortunate we were, it was the very last one in the store. Just meant to be.

We then wandered around the shops, picking up a few more souvenirs and keepsakes to take home – so much to pack – before dropping those bits and pieces off at the hotel, picking up a baguette au jambon et fromage and finding a lovely shady spot in the park – our park – to munch our favourite French lunch while people watching.

At about 1.30 we boarded the coach for the trip to Versailles. Yes, we could have simply caught a train, but this was actually a pretty good deal. We bought tickets for the coach without the guided tour option, which meant we got a bit of commentary in the coach on the way, bypassed the huge queues, picked up our headsets, and spent the afternoon wandering around at our leisure, knowing that at a certain time we could simply make our way back to the coach for the trip back to Paris.

Versailles - nothing prepares you for this place.

 

Nothing, absolutely nothing, prepares you for the opulence and the extravagance of Versailles. No wonder the peasants revolted! This place is fabulous beyond all belief. Initially we had the camera out, wanting to snap lots of photos, but within a very few minutes your eyes protest – they don’t want any barrier between them and what they are looking at. You just have to put the camera away and absorb it all as much as you can. You can buy a book with all the wonderful professional photographs, because this is for experiencing, not for recording. And so, after a handful of shots, the camera is relegated to the bottom of the bag.




Beauty everywhere

 

 

The self-guided tour with the headsets is just the best way to visit the place as you can spend as long or as little in any area as you wish, and you can replay the relevant parts of the recording to go over something which you missed or which is particularly interesting.

And people everywhere

 

Even though you understand why the people revolted, when you stand in the chamber where Marie Antoinette was defended at the last, you can almost feel the fear which she must have felt. Despite yourself, there are places such as these which provoke a real emotional response, which takes you a bit by surprise.

 

You also laugh over the concept that people would pay to watch the King sitting on the throne, and I don’t mean the big throne, I mean, of course, the loo. Apparently watching him eat and watching him get rid of what he had eaten were desirable things to do. Thank God the world has changed.

Stunning

 

When you visit the theatre you are totally blown away. What looks like beautiful carved marble is actually all timber, just painted and cut in such a way that nobody would know that it’s not gleaming, veined marble. It really is quite awe-inspiring.

Nothing is just for function.

 

 

At each bend of a stair you come across more and more and more marvellous artwork, or windows placed so as to give a view that just takes your breath away totally. I think I’d hang around the windows for hours, just going from one to another.




Stunning statues
(with classical music wafting from the greenery)

 



The hall of mirrors is – no, can’t describe it. It is one of the loveliest things you could see in your whole life. You can imagine it with beautifully dressed and wigged women, with their fans and lace handkerchiefs, and bewigged and powdered men bowing low before the women before leading them in a dance, perhaps a minuette, who knows, and wonderful baroque music echoing off the walls. It’s more than the stuff of fairy-stories.

 

One thing which really did amaze us was the water reservoir on top of the building.  At first glimpse you think somebody had added a rooftop swimming pool, but, no, it was part of the original construction. It is really huge, and is there to serve two purposes: (a) because there is so much wood in the building, should a fire break out it is a ready source of water, and (b) in times when rainfall is low, it provides water for irrigating the extensive gardens. What marvellous foresight.
 



Lots of beautiful fountains

 

Now, the gardens are just gorgeous. I really wanted to shout “Fire, fire” or some such thing to make everybody flee so that we could wander freely through the stunning grounds, admiring the beautiful statuary and the lovely classical music which flowed from hidden speakers in topiaries and hedges. The place, sadly, was packed, though, and even taking photographs was difficult – they all looked as though we were photographing people we had never met because it was just about impossible to get a shot of anything without some smiling tourist popping into view.
 

 

Now, there are souvenir shops and there are souvenir shops. This souvenir shop was lovely, and some of the merchandise they sold was absolutely gorgeous – could have spent a fortunate. We did pick up a few really nice bits and pieces, and so more stuff for the suitcase.

And did I mention people?

Was there a downside? Yes. The only bummer, apart from the huge cobbles/settes of the ground which make looking anywhere but at your feet while you walk dangerous, was the solid phalanx of souvenir sellers that you have to squeeze through or past just to get through the gates. When I say solid, I mean they are shoulder to shoulder, all with their huge arrays of leather handbags, shiny Eiffel Towers, Notre Dame snowdomes, etc. That really is, frankly, awful. We walked along the line to the end and got around that way, but we could see that there were some older people who were quite intimidated, and for them to have to go way off to the side to get past this veritable human barrier is really unacceptable. One young American guy tried to engage one of the handbag sellers in conversation, with “Hi there. I just want to talk to you. Can I please just talk to you?” He had no success: he wasn’t buying, and conversation was not of interest. You can look at it as another travel experience, or you can look it at as a really bad aspect of a wonderful tourism site. I think it’s pretty bad, actually.
 

 

In the evening we wandered down rue Saint-Honoré and dined at a restaurant we hadn’t tried before. The food was quite ordinary, and we really wished that we had gone back to one of our favourites. Ah well, such is life.

Village of Versailles over the treetops

 

Before heading back to the hotel we strolled once more, for one final night-time view, over to the Louvre, hoping to keep an image of her and the Eiffel permanently imbedded in our brain. So incredibly lovely.

What an amazing place -  but it is
no wonder the people revolted.

 

And so back to the hotel for our last sleep in Paris before heading back home.”

Catch you tomorrow.

 

France: Canal Boat Trip Ends, Chatillon-sur-Loire to Gien, Gien to Paris

12 May

From the journal:

“A quick pack, a final clean, a perfectly satisfactory handover back to the Crown Blue rep, and it was time to say goodbye to our lovely Cirrus. We enjoyed her so much, irrespective of how ill we were.



Goodbye Cirrus, et merci beaucoup!

The manager at the Connoisseur office called a taxi for us to take us to Gien, where we would get a train back to Paris. The taxi arrived really quickly and so the canal was soon left behind. The drive to Gien took about half an hour, and was a drive through beautiful countryside, so another enjoyable episode. The lady taxi driver suggested that she take us first to a shop or supermarket before going to the railway station as she said the station was really small and we wouldn’t be able to get anything to eat there. We – stupid us – declined the offer and got her to take us straight to the station.

We had about 90 minutes to wait for the train, and the taxi driver was so right – there was no café or such at the station, only a dispensing machine where you could buy crisps and soft drinks.


I have to say, I did really well buying our tickets. I had been mentally rehearsing exactly what to say, and the transaction was speedy and uneventful, and we had our tickets in our hand in a couple of minutes. It was amazing, though, to watch French people coming in to buy tickets. It was never speedy and uneventful; it was a case of lots and lots of conversation, sometimes consternation, sometimes argumentation, sometimes bordering on confrontation. We were stunned: how could I, a foreigner, find buying a ticket so quick and easy, while for the locals it was almost high drama. So fascinating!

Wandering outside, I spotted a little bar/bistro down the road and suggested we go there to have a drink and a bite to eat. HUGE MISTAKE! We lugged our luggage (like that!), walked inside, and – oooh. It was like some ghastly truckies place, and I’m talking tough truckies. The place smelled sooo bad. All conversation stopped. Everybody in there – all those leather or donkey jacketed men with shaved heads and their friends – turned and just starred at us. No welcoming “Bonjour” here. We sort of smiled, very difficult to do when you’re feeling so conspicuous and uncomfortable.  There was a sort of enclosed verandah where we could see quite a few Asian people sitting, and so we went out there, thinking that perhaps they were fellow tourists and so it may be a more comfortable option. Hm, these were not fellow tourists, these were just more of the sort of people who were inside, except maybe worse because they made me think of the North Vietnamese guys in “The Deer Hunter”, and I was waiting for them to pull out a gun for a game of Russian RouletAnd to make things even worse, if the air inside was bad, the air out here was even worse. God only knows what they were smoking out there, but it just about made my eyes water.  We tried to act really cool, pretended that nothing on the menu appealed, and exited stage left, attempting to do so in a really casual manner and not run, which is what we wanted to do. Phew, when travelling there will definitely be times that take you way outside your comfort zone, times when you really don’t feel at all at ease – I’ve felt it in a couple of country towns here in Australia – and so it had to happen at some time in beautiful France.

So, we walked back down the street to the station, and those dispenser machines looked sooo good to us now. Coke and crisps for lunch, what could be better.

The train was, of course, lovely, and the carriages super comfortable. There was only one other person in our carriage for the whole trip to Paris, so we were free to ooh and aah over the stunning scenery as much as we liked.

The train pulled into Gare de Lyon, and we felt that we had been away for far more than a week. We walked straight out of the station and got a taxi straight away to take us back to the Emeraude Louvre Montana.

Ah, during the cab ride we got to be part of a little play in itself, as at one point we were pulled up at traffic lights and the people in the car next to us wound down their window and asked our driver for directions to somwhere. Like a taxi driver in “The Amazing Race” he gave very long, very involved directions, but then ended up telling them to follow him. And so we swept through the streets of Paris – no, not with the warm wind in our hair – with our taxi driver waving his arm in the air to the vehicle behind us, beeping to say goodbye when it was their time to turn off. It was charming and another example of people going out of their way to help others.



Ah, here she is to greet us.

When we got back to the hotel, it was wonderful to find that we had been allocated the same room we had stayed in before the canal boat trip, and beautiful to have the staff say hello and welcome us back. It really felt like coming home. The Louvre Montana’s management really know how to pick great employees.




What a wave.

 

We dropped our bags in the room and then headed around the corner to rue Saint-Honoré for some lunch at one of our favourite little cafés before heading back to the hotel for a long, long, long bath. Ah, heaven!

Must find out who this guy was, because we walked past
this statue almost every day and I fell in love with it.

In the evening we walked around the corner to Cityrama and booked ourselves onto a trip to Versailles for the 13^th, and then wandered along rue de Rivoli picking up a few more souvenirs to take home.

For dinner we – of course – went back to Le Carrousel, and the meal was really fantastic. We had a wonderful, flirty waiter. I couldn’t decide what to have for dessert and so he brought me a whole plate of tiny tasters – no, not café gourmand, there were at least half a dozen delicious delights. Fabulous.
 

She is even more lovely at night.

A final walk over to gaze at the Louvre to our left and the Eiffel to our right in the moonlight, and then back to our room and into that huge, huge super comfortable bed for the best sleep we’d had for days.”

What a great outlook for a restaurant.

See you at Versailles tomorrow.