Phone booths, guards - London style

 The Queen was out on holiday for Easter weekend, no visit with her, but we got to enjoy the outside of her palace for a few minutes before continuing our walk to de-stress and enjoy the cold weather. Wow, cold!

a look back at the palace and large round-a-bout statue

a ways down the main street to the palace, there was these 2 guards.....guarding the Queen's garden.

a look at the London Eye

 a guard for the horses stable - they do a lesser known changing of the guards here, unfortunately at the same time as the big changing of the guards ceremony at the palace.

 haha, I'm a dork.

 Jeff I think made him smirk asking him if he was cold or made some sarcastic comment about being cold.

Now to the phone booth - this one smelled like urine.....which makes Jeff's picture all that much more gross for him. :)

 Piccadilly Square

Original Sight-seeing London tour bus

Day 1 - after that day - in London.

We bought passes for the Original London sightseeing hop-on-hop-off tour company and along with it came a free cruise on the Thames River. I didn't think we'd use that, so off we set on the bus tour. We took the red and yellow bus lines to get where we wanted.

Wahoo! Bring on the coats, hats, gloves, layers, and more layers of clothing - it's 32 degrees with a chance of snow flurries!!!!

that day

There's always that day - that one time during any trip (or at least on the amazing race, biggest loser, survivor, etc) where there's a melt down, a break down, a falling apart. The perfect day suddenly becomes the worst day? Yeah that one. The one where everyone is crying, yelling, screaming, silently cursing (sometimes it audible), I miss my kids, I want to go home, take the wrong turn and end up in Italy instead of Germany? Well we didn't end up in Germany or Italy, but we didn't end up in London at the time we were supposed to either.

We decided (before we left) to take the Eurostar - the train under the Chunnel to the UK. I had looked at that ticket a thousand times and read it correctly and even told Jeff the right time. The one time I didn't look at it right cost us. And cost us big time. BIG TIME. We went out for breakfast and had a traditional Paris breakfast which happen to be Palm Sunday. We had croissants, jellies, juice, hot chocolate, bread, fruit bowl and milk. YUMMY! We left the restaurant and walked out to the St. Germain church again.

 They were selling Palms out in front of the church and asking for donations. We took a quick tour around the church to realize we had already been there before. :) Then went back to the hotel for our stuff. We arrived at the train station, couldn't find our train time, re-checked the tickets and here's where the day went from relaxing and chilled, to crappy and horrible in about 2 seconds. Not only did we arrive at the wrong time, but the train had already left........an hour ago.

$600+, 2 tickets, one angry husband, one horrible embarrassed and terrified wife later, we boarded a train to the UK. Jeff slept the whole way, I tried to figure out how to fix the error I had made. 

While I did that, I took pictures of the French countryside speeding by.

I'm not sure how I got this picture....but we took a somewhat happy photo on the underground.
 this is the underground station we arrived at in the London - so awesome! not awesome was Jeff's card being declined as we tried to buy our passes for all the tourist sites.

 We finally arrive at our hotel in the London only to find out our room was not ready and they were going to upgrade us - sweet.......apparently upgrade in London does not mean the same as in the US. Bigger room, yes. Bigger bathroom, yes. Okay so far so good. 3 beds, no. Basement floor - definitely no. Free internet - nope, used the wrong site to book the room, have to pay for internet. I'm sorry - where's the upgrade?

We found a place to eat not before all that crying was done by me, apologizing, and wanting to go home so I didn't screw anything else up and cost us more money. I felt really bad, Jeff was understandably upset and well we would have made every highlight for 2 weeks before this episode would have aired.

At dinner, Jeff paid the waitress and was never brought any change back......she never even came back to the table after taking our money. Luckily he didn't over pay her very much or I'm not sure what would have happened.

so to re-cap:

missed eurostar train

$600+ for new tickets

card declined at the London train station for much needed tourist passes/underground passes

upgrade at the hotel - not an upgrade

free internet - not free

not an awesome day.

we agreed to move on.

Crepes - yummy crepes

 Our amazing Concierge left us the address of her favorite Crepe place. We headed there for dinner when we got back from Versailles. It's called Little Breizh. Big enough for 10 small tables and a kitchen open to the whole place. We arrived and had to wait about 15 minutes for a table. While we ate, at least 20 more people came and left because of the wait for another table. Popular little place and the food was amazing! Having only heard of dessert crepes, we had no idea there were dinner crepes too. Not knowing if we could order just the dessert, we looked around and quickly observed the other customers and decided to order dinner and dessert crepes. Delicious! Muah!

I was impressed with the staff: the brother cooking and making everything, doing the dishes too. And the sister - waiting tables, taking payments and clearing tables too. They kept that place moving and all the customers were happy as can be. I wish we had eaten more crepes and desserts there. :)

 maple ice cream, caramel sauce and brown sugar - with 2 marshmallow bears - I ate 1. :)

 this is how they park.....and I wanted to know how they did it without ruining any other vehicles around them. This car actually had space to move - others were literally bumper to bumper.

 Motorcycles lining the sidewalk .

 Lucky for us, this guy decided to show us how to park like Parisians. :)

 

 as to not looking like we were stalking the guy parking his car, we posed for a self portrait. :)

Chateau de Versailles

 Saturday of our Paris excursion, we decided to leave the comforts of Paris and head out to 

Chateau de Versaille 

and see this beyond ridiculous Palace, Estate, Smaller palaces and of course Marie Antionette's estate away from the Palace.......and miles of walking around gardens to see statues under repair, crew teams on the man-made lake which was a mile long, and perfectly trimmed trees. And this is exactly why the Palace was originally built. It was a 'refuge' from city/government life, to the country......until all your so-called friends follow you out there to party, then you build a 'smaller' palace to get away from the larger Palace. Rough life right? Well yes when the cost of the palace is more than half of the country's GDP. All the poor people run, clean, cook, decorate (because the queen's room has to be in season.....and that's just her room), care for the children, the grounds and whatever party the King is hosting. No wonder they were bitter and beheaded the King and the Queen.

So we hopped on the train and headed out to the country. We got a little hungry on the way and I pulled out some fruit leather. I handed one to Jeff and ate it no problem. The girl across the aisle had a problem though. I could see her just staring at us, trying to figure out what on earth we were eating that looked a pale green and possibly like something we scraped off the bottom of our shoes and packaged. haha - it was hilarious. I wish I would have offered her one and could understand what she was saying to the other 2 boys she was with.....too funny.

I waited in line while Jeff went to see if we could get in a shorter line with our Museum Pass - no such luck, but the line did move quickly. For good reason - this place is so huge, it would be hard to cap the number of people.

 We listened to the audio guide and toured the main palace.

 a scale model before upgrades.

 This is the entire property - good grief.

 King Louis the 14th

 us and all of our friends. (I'm in the bottom right corner)

 the balcony of the chapel where the King and his family would worship.....all others sat below and watched the King.

 I ordered the LARGE door.....about a quarter of the way through the palace, I started to lose interest, we found food and I was ready for more. Guess my blood sugar was low.

 the Hall of Mirrors - was said that people were so vain they wanted to look at themselves all the time.
This is where the grand parties and dances were held

 more of our friends

 the War room - paintings throughout history of war

 this was in the 1830 room

 The Queen's room. There is a secret door off to the right where the King could enter for a night-cap when he wasn't off with some other woman. What a lovely marriage.....and she would change the decor for every season. The important things in life.

 I lost track of what all the rooms were for or whom they were for.

 The fountain under construction and the path to more gardens, palaces and estates and the man-made 2 mile lake in the shape of an X

 Out to the palace away from the palace

 Game room

 we sat down outside to enjoy the beautiful weather and relax our aching feet.

This was another small modest home (on the main floor)

 pool parlor - this was Marie Antoinette's own 'home'

 somebody was a little snoopy, looking through a locked door.

 We didn't even see the entire place, but it was definitely an experience to be had. We saw where the Treaty of Versailles was signed - war meetings were held and amazing moments in history were had. The train we had planned to use - the track was shut down for an accident. We had to leave the station and find our way to another station.....not many English speaking and the announcement gave no direction on how to get to the next station. We hooked up with another couple from New York and made our way to the new station after asking someone who could only speak French and Portuguese - English and Spanish for us, and English and some Indian for the other couple. We made it though and bonded for that time. I gave them our Rick Steves Paris book and we ended our day at Versailles.