Our first stop was to check out the unfettered extravagance left to us by Louis XIV. Anca found a great bargain on a nice hotel “Trianon Palace” pictured above, so we felt like guests of the king... it was a great introduction to France. Anna loved running around the beautiful spring-time garden.
One of our first impressions of France is that the people here are very friendly and helpful. Although it’s true that we haven’t spent time in notoriously-snobbish Paris yet, almost everyone has been warm and hospitable.
For sight-seeing, our first stop was the château of course, where we took the nice portrait of Heinzi. Inside it was astoundingly opulent but very crowded, so we made our way to the other sights on the estate: Grand Trianon and Petit Trianon, but our favorite was Marie Antoinette’s hamlet. It seems that miss Antoinette wanted to make her own little “genuine peasant experience”, so on one side of her vast garden she crafted a private village that she could visit whenever she had the urge to live the simple life for a while... a sort of royal Disneyland. We appreciated the fact that there were very few tourists there, and had fun chasing a swan around the pond.