Today we visited the grand palace at Versailles about ten miles outside of Paris. I think it takes the prize as my favorite spot in France that we visited (with St. Chapelle coming in second). There were seemingly miles of sumptuously decorated rooms in the palace, then literally miles of exquisite gardens with perfectly manicured shrubs and flowers dotted with various sized fountains (which were on at various points today as it was a weekend, they were a beautiful sight). For lunch I had a cheese sandwich on a baguette and a butter-sugar crepe for dessert, yum! (and yay for getting in a few “typical” French menu items).
So lots of pictures were taken today (around 200), I was just blown away by the sheer magnitude of it all, just one of the gardens we saw was more varied than a botanical garden, and there were ten other gardens to see. Each had it’s own style, some very simple and small with an acre of shrubs and grass and a fountain, while others were many acres with dozens of different flowers planted in various patterns and groupings.
The palace closed at 1730 and so we headed out around 1700, but wanted to stick around town and have dinner, unfortunately in Europe that means waiting around until 1900, so we meandered about the area near the restaurant recommended by our guidebook Chez Lazare, and boy am I glad we waited around.
The food was great, classic French, cozy atmosphere, and not intimidating like the place we ate the night before. The place specialized in grilled foods and fish, they had an open charcoal grill just inside the dining room so you could watch everuthing being cooked. We split a half liter of white wine (light, fruity, but not too sweet, very good). Jeremy ordered a mini ravioli appetizer that came in a tasty butter-cheese sauce (very good for dipping chewy French bread into), then we both had grilled Atlantic salmon with buerre blanc sauce, yum! For a side I ended up having a baked potato (I saw “pommes” something on the menu and figured, I like potatoes, can’t go wrong with that), which was also really good, different than one in the states, it wasn’t a typical “baking” potato but a large white potato with what I assume is the French variation on sour cream, it was a bit thinner and had more of a citrus-y tang to it than American sour cream, but very tasty. And to finish things off jeremy had the creme brûlée (which was excellent) and I had “fromage blanc” with a berry coulis, which was really good, the cheese was very creamy, like thick yougurt, and similar in taste to plain yougurt, a little tangy and not too sweet, a very yummy end to the evening.
The train ride back had some good people watching, there was a cute two year old that was bouncing and jumping on the seat in front of us just giggling away and next to us two college kids were chatting, him in French and her in English, so that was fun to listen to the multi-lingual conversation.
Overall this has been a fantastic trip, got to see lots of stuff, have some tasty food, take lots of pictures, and have a really fun time in the process.
Tomorrow our flight leaves Charles de Gaulle around 1230 and we will say au revoir to Europe, until next time 😉