By Chloe Martin
From the arrival, one must see the historical castle. It should be difficult to give here an exact description of this magnificent palace built under Louis XIV’s reign” (p. 51-52, “Fourth Day Afternoon”).
For anyone who heard my minute-by-minute review of Versailles, it might be surprising to find out that it would be my last blog post ever.* BUT, in keeping with the title of the Guilmin Guide (“Paris Seen in Four Days and Versailles”), I always knew that it would have to serve as the “and” of these posts. The guide leads up to Versailles with a running start, packing multiple parts of Paris into one day and then slamming into spending only a half a day to visit Versailles (after the ~hour long trip to get there). We spent close to seven hours in Versailles and still failed to see everything, so I feel like the guide’s credibility sort of fell apart with this one.
Though Guilmin did the bare minimum when describing the Arc de Triomphe, they spared no expense with the wordiness of this site’s description.** To be fair, the size and the pomp would take me at LEAST two pages to describe if I were trying to sell someone on it, but I would also be sure to warn them about the dark sides of visiting such an overwhelming spot which could fill another four pages.
Despite the universal hatred that many of us felt for the heat/crowds/lack of food/tour guide by the end of that day, one thing that many of us did NOT share was the same experience in the gardens. We quickly splintered off into lots of little groups for our free time to roam the gardens and only realized at the end of the day that not one group had seen or experienced the same things as another. In turn, we all enjoyed different aspects of the trip. Cosette and I tended to find our way to the water displayed while other groups focused on the more manicured gardens, the statues, the food, etc. Coming together at the end of the day and comparing notes was one of my favorite parts, even when it was annoying to realized I missed something worth seeing.
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Not to be sappy or anything but I had a really great time experiencing Paris (& yes, even Versailles) with everyone on the trip and seeing how each one of us made this trip our own while still just being a bunch of building and planning nerds at heart. Enjoy this picture of a section of Versailles that I never made it to and was grumpy about missing!
** 🙁 sad
***Guilmin also alternated between referring to it as a castle and a palace, and learning that it is a castle and NOT a palace is just about the only thing I retained from the 2+ hour long guided tour.