June 10, 2018
June 10, 2018
Whenever I talk to my junior high history classes (at least
to those students who are awake) about the French Revolution, I ask if anyone
has ever been to Versailles. Over my
many years of teaching, I have had a few students who have been. Since most have not, I attempt to explain
just how massive it is, but words cannot adequately describe it. As I say to my students, if you ever get a
chance to go and see the splendor that is Versailles and see how the royal
family lived and then think that the vast majority of people fifteen miles away
in Paris couldn’t buy food for their families, you have a pretty good idea of
why the French Revolution happened.
Setting aside the whole Reign of Terror, massive uprisings
and decades of French political turmoil, visiting Versailles today is a pretty
amazing experience. We couldn’t have
timed our visit better. If you get a
chance to go, I would highly recommend getting an online reservation with a set
day and time. That helped us avoid a ridiculously
long line to get in. We toured the
massive palace (or at least the small fraction that is open to the public which
is still massive in itself), ate lunch in a café in the palace, visited one
other area in the palace and then toured the gardens.
The only really negative to the trip so far is that with all
of the walking yesterday, Becky did something to one of her feet (maybe a
pulled muscle?) – definitely not an ideal situation to explore the massive
grounds of Versailles. She is a trooper
though, and she and I walked slowly through the center of the gardens leaving
Dee, Zac and Katie to explore more of grounds.
There are multiple outlaying “mini” palaces and other
buildings on the Versailles grounds where the royal family could escape court
life, and Zac was particularly tickled to visit le Hameau de la Reine that he had learned about in his French class
this year. We strolled around this idealized version of a peasant’s village
that Marie Antoinette had built and has an almost Disneyesque feel to it.
After our visit to the palace and what we had the time and
energy to see of the grounds, we then went to visit the LDS Temple that opened
last year right near Versailles. We had
a chance to see the courtyard and visitor’s center and visit with some of the
missionaries. We even ran into another
American family visiting as well, and we made the connection that the dad of
the family had served in the same mission as me, and we overlapped for a while. He wasn’t someone I knew directly, but I knew
of him.
Anyway, we made it to our 2nd AirBnB tonight, and
we are off to Disneyland Paris tomorrow.
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