Versailles

Wow!  After seeing Versailles it's not hard to understand why the French Revolution happened.  What an amazing palace!  We got there in the morning and the sun was so bright shining off all the gold it was hard to even open our eyes.  We got through the long ticket line fairly quickly only to realize there was a line ten times that long snaking around the courtyard to enter the palace.

After an hour in line we finally made it in the palace.  I couldn't get a lot of great pictures inside because it was so packed with people.  We inadvertently skipped the end of the tour but it was still such a huge and elegant place.  The most spectacular room was the Hall of Mirrors.

After a couple of hours of fighting the crowds in the castle we headed out to the gardens.  As spectacular as the palace was I enjoyed the gardens even more.  They stretched for miles behind the castle.  Ethan and Cecilia met us for a picnic lunch and we wandered through the gardens.  They turned the fountains on (hundreds of them, literally) for a couple hours in the afternoon while classical music was playing.  It was so much fun and Skyler loved the fountains.  There was no way to make it to see all of them but we found some great ones.

Then we went to tour Marie Antoinette's "small" palace and hamlet.  Here little Bavarian village and farm looked like it had come straight from Disneyland.  It shed a lot of light on how she was living in this life of luxury and had no idea what was really going on with the people at the time.