Thinking Rosie: If Louis XIV lived today he'd have a "grill"

Side note: I don't know if these people are still fighting some kind of war... but all the clocks are on military time. I spend more time counting things out on my fingers trying to figure out what time it is.

Nancy graciously let me sleep in a for a few hours today. The few nights have been beyond late. Got myself up and moving and out the door, but not before we stole breakfast from a business group at the hotel. There breakfast was all laid out waiting for them and we sat down and had at it. Ooops. We didn't realize what we had done until we were sitting there with mouths full of food and the people walking by were disgusted w/ us. Hey! We're Americans! Don't leave food laying around. After we made a quick get-away from the hotel, we walked from the hotel to the train station to grab the train to Versailles. Nanc had other plans for today, so I met up w/ Laurence (she lives in Versailles area). The funny part was as we were walking I had to stop and take a few pictures, I'm pretty sure I past everything before, but everythings so beautiful sometimes you need to get a shot of one more thing. The way home was like that as well, my camera battery died midway thru Versailles so I couldn't grab any on the way home. It really is a beautiful city. And the Parisians feel the same way about it. Le Michigan Ave was very quite. I haven't seen it like that once since I got here.

My beautiful friend Nancy with the Rockwell bag! :) Still on our way to the train station.

Got to the metro and Laurence greeted me and we were off! Versailles is spectacular and I had a great time w/ Laurence as well. It was nice to spend some time getting to know one another. We had prepurchesed our tickets in hopes of a shorter wait, but the que was miles long. It moved pretty fast. She said that Paris is the number one visited city in the world. Not surprising. Everywhere I went there were thousands of people from all over, and 90% of them were at Versailles w/ us. :) The weather was perfect! It was the first sunny day we've had in Paris! So happy I got to spend it at a place painted in gold!

PS - It's a good thing I'm going home tomorrow. I'm out of adjectives to describe things in Paris. Starting after this if I use an adjective and it has an * by it, I used the thesaurus on it.

It's amazing to think of all the things that happened in those palaces, the number of people they would have needed to keep it up and running. Candles to light it! The peasants coming to ransack it and then drag the king and queen into town to behead them. That palace has seen a lot of crazy days. :) They said they're on a quest to track down the original furniture from the palace that was taken when the riots happened. How they would even know where to start w/ something like that is beyond me.

Everything was opulent. Gold, gold, gold, mirror, mirror, mirror, crystal, crystal, crystal, oh yeah and there was some gold. They apparently touch it up from time to time - including the paintings on the walls and ceiling. If you think about what most of those paintings would have been painted with (egg whites and powdered pigments I think) it's crazy. The ceilings were astonishing*, most had paintings that were telling the story off the greatness of France or the king or the queen. Usually thru the use of mythological (real word?) creatures. Needless to say, the art was more then a little boastful. :) They weren't trying to paint the picture of a couple people that were just down home.

The masses of people shoving from room to room was a little overwhelming*. It was nice to get out of the house and into the garden. The garden was vast* and wiggedy wack (I came up w/ this one myself)! It went on forever and was so beautiful. Everywhere you went fountains and statues and flowers and architected trees. Mazes of forest. We sat and had lunch in this area and had a great time talking w/ Laurence. It was just a perfect day.

(most of these pictures are on my phone (battery in my good camera died) that I don't have the cord w/ me to download, the ones I did take from the window aren't really the garden, but a taste of it. Will have to upload those at a later time.)

We wandered around the grounds a bit more and then Laurence helped me get back on the train to Paris and I popped up out from under the ground at Invalide (it sounds better if you say it in French, otherwise it sounds like your injured or you're invalid, no one wants to feel like that). Ta da! Thankfully too, there were some Italian mid-school aged children that had taken over the train w/ goings on. Then I immediately went the wrong way and had to whip my map out. Then I was on my way and got worried I wasn't so I turned around and walked back the other way and finally whipped my map and had to walk back the way I had come. And then I was on my street Le Michigan Ave and couldn't get my bearings even tho I was looking at the arch, but decided to go for it anyway. Thankfully it was right. So, while this story ends well, I think it also shows us that I'm not going to be leading a tour group thru Paris anytime soon. Poor people - that would be a fun ride (no comments Kevie). "If you look to your left, oh wait... I think I'm going the wrong way." Anywho.

All the people had returned to Le Michigan Ave. The crazy man in his priest robe, the begging girls, the crazy group dancers, all of them were back home! And so was I!

I gave the begging man some money and he was VERY happy. I think he had lost hope in me.

Nancy has plans to grab food in the Jewish area tonight, so I'm looking forward to that. Let me tell you a secret about Nancy. She can work like an American, party like a Parisian and eventually she runs out of gas. You tuck her in, turn out the lights, take her phone calls for 1.5 hours and that girls back in business. It's unstinking believable. That's what I love about her. Seriously, if you could bottle her love of life and sell it there would be some amped up people in this world. :) She says she'll sleep when she's dead... me, as much as I hate to admit it, I want to sleep while in the current world. :)

Just a few other shots worth seeing: