Saturday 12th April - The Palace at Versailles

We again ventured out on the bikes for a tour of the Palace at Versailles. It involved a ride to the train station, a train trip to Versailles, an hour or so buying picnic supplies from the Versailles markets, a couple of hours riding around the Palace grounds, a picnic lunch in the grounds looing back along the lake to the palace followed by a tour of the palace itself. The tour group were mostly Australian couples with a few Americans thrown in.

The markets were great and it was an experience to jostle with the crowds to purchase baguettes, cheese and pastries for our lunch.

The ride around the palace grounds was very pleasant but again, we were I suspect, two or three weeks early. The gardens were only just starting to emerge from winter and the trees were yet to acquire their new leaves.

The Palace itself was a disappointment. Not so much for its beauty but for the quality of the site as a vehicle for presenting the history of the French people. Certainly it is opulent almost beyond belief but the way it is presented is poor in the extreme. Signage is terrible and the organisation is almost non existent. The crowds even in this semi off-season were over powering with numerous tour groups each with their own tour leaders fighting for position within each room of the enormous palace. The tour groups themselves were not only competing with each other but also with the hundreds (thousands?) of self guided individuals each equipped with their less than adequate audio guides.

Even the car park was a scene of chaos. Bernie and I sat and watched a queue of cars lined up for entry with the ticket dispense sometimes taking up to two or three minutes to admit just one car.

To cap it all off a tourist venue that sees thousands and thousands of visitors each year had only one café. It was inside the grounds and had impossible queues. Outside the grounds there was no sign of any form of convenience ranging from toilets to food stations and not place for the many waiting visitors to sit down.

Versailles is not something that the French should be proud of either now or in the days of Louis 16th

In the evening we tried dinner at an extremely well known French bistro known as the Brusserie Balzar. By reputation it is one of the finest restaurants in the Latin Quarter that specialises in local French food. That being the case then we assume that the French eat cold chicken and exceptional rare veal served with less than adequate white wine.

Off to Avignon tomorrow.