Visiting (and Evacuating) Versailles

October 22

Sam:

In the morning, we had to get up kind of early because we had to get ready to leave Paris. We had a final stop at our bakery and took a train to get to Versailles.

Versailles is a city just outside of Paris that has a humongous palace in it. The Sun King, Louis XIV, lived there. The palace is full of everything you could imagine, especially people. The crowds were so big, I don’t even have a word to describe it.

There were a lot of paintings, all depicting either gods and goddesses or royalty. Most of the furniture was big and fancy. Almost everything was made of our painted gold.

The Hall of Mirrors wasn’t really what I expected. I thought it would be a short hall with a bunch of mirrors in it. Instead, it was one of the biggest rooms in the palace with many crystal chandeliers and entire walls of mirrors. It was shiny, fancy, and crazy.

At the start of the French Revolution, one of the guards got stabbed and was dying but he still managed to get to Marie Antoinette’s wing and yelled, “Save the Queen” before he collapsed and died.

Charlotte:

When we were going to go into the gardens, we weren’t allowed to go. Lots of police were coming and they were evacuating the gardens. After about 20 minutes, they reopened the gardens and let us in. We saw the police taking away two men and some backpacks.

In the gardens, it was pretty. There were lots of gold fountains and statues and many trees were cut into triangles. The gardens were extremely huge. There was even a map! It took 3 hours for us to walk through and we didn’t even see all of it.

One of my favourite parts was a cool fountain where the water was “dancing” to music. It reminded me of watching dancers.

We found a bench and had a picnic. A cute, little bird kept coming up to us, and Dad fed it chips (so did I).

Every single statue and fountain was a Pokestop. Dad, Mom, and Sam all play Pokemon Go, so they had lots of fun.

We took an Uber to go back into Paris to catch our train to Caen. The Uber took us through the traffic circle surrounding the Arc de Triomphe, the biggest, traffic-iest traffic circle ever. It has 12 streets coming into it and cars driving everywhere!