Final days…

Dedicating a whole day to Versailles was worthwhile. We arrived early enough to avoid the big queues but still ended up crammed in amongst the tour groups as we tried to navigate some of the 700 rooms of this vast and famous palace built to house Louis XIV’s court of 6,000 people. It was shuffle pace only going through the ‘Galerie des Glaces’ (Hall of Mirrors) and the King and Queen’s bedrooms, but even so, we couldn’t help marvelling at the immense wealth which created it all.

The gardens and grounds provided a bit more space to breathe and the rain held off long enough for us to have a good walk around and visit the pretty palace of Marie-Antoinette and the village of quaint little buildings she created in her gardens.

Back in Paris, our ‘last supper’ as a group went down well at a local restaurant where the kind waiters looked after us so patiently as we indulged in fondues of various sorts together with the prize-giving for the best participant in the Mission Impossible challenge won by Jesse.

The evening wound up with a concert on a boat on the Seine where the kids were the youngest there by some years. The band was the Great Lakes Swimmers from Canada and, when they eventually played, everyone, even us oldies, enjoyed the music. We didn’t quite get stuck in the Métro station when the train we were returning to the hotel on stopped running, but it was after midnight by the time we got ‘home’.