The Palace at Versailles

I guess you guys are not yet tired of my Europe stories! I decided I will post one story per vote in favour of European stories, so, keep voting if you want to hear more.

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For today's story, we are back in Paris on June 12th. It is pouring rain. I decided to go on a day trip to the Palace of Versailles, which is a good 45 minutes by train outside of Paris, hoping that it might be less rainy there and if not, well, it was also an indoor museum so I wouldn't get soaked.

I arrived there at around noon, and it had stopped raining, though the clouds in the sky looked rather ominous. I lined up for tickets to get into the palace. The queue was long and extended outdoors in front of the palace.

There was a lovely, friendly American woman in line behind me named Donna. She noticed I was looking through an English-language travel guide and started up a conversation with me because she was pleased to find someone who spoke her language (she didn't speak French). She asked me where my hometown was, and I told her I was from Vancouver. She reacted with surprise, "Oh! I was just talking to a couple from Vancouver. They were sitting across from me on the train from Paris. In fact, they're around here somewhere... they'll be coming back looking for me shortly so I'll introduce them to you!"

Sure enough, about five minutes later, the Vancouverite couple showed up, and I immediately thought the man looked familiar for some reason, but I couldn't place him. I knew that being from the same city, it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that I'd crossed paths with him before, but I really had no clue where I might have met him and he didn't appear to recognise me, so I dismissed the thought, thinking he must simply look like someone I knew.

A moment or two after our introduction, the clouds pretty much exploded with torrential rain. Only Donna and I had umbrellas, so we invited the Vancouver couple to share our shelters. I ended up sharing my umbrella with the man I thought I recognized. We chatted for a few minutes about his job and my travels, and then promptly ran out of things to say. In an effort to keep the conversation rolling, I mentioned that he looked quite familiar to me. To my surprise, he responded saying he also knew he recognized me from somewhere, but he couldn't place me. So at that point I knew that we must have met at some point!

It took us only a minute or two more to realize he was my high school computers teacher. He only vaguely recognized me because I look quite a bit older than I did ten years ago, and I had been unable to place him because he was so out of context for me! I don't see my high school teachers on vacation in Paris, I see them in class. Ten years ago. It threw me for a loop.

My teacher Bill on the left, me on the right, and Donna, the woman who brought us together, in the centre

We spent the rest of the day together. He was so chuffed to have run into me, he paid for my entrance fee to the palace and the extra fee for me so I could join them on a guided English audio tour (which I simply couldn't have afforded on my own), and we spent the day recounting old high school stories and talking about teachers and students who long ago left the school, while walking through the Hall of Mirrors, Marie Antoinette's bedroom, and the palace gardens (once the rain finally cleared up.) It was weird hearing high school gossip from a teacher's point of view, but really fun. And I got a way better experience at the palace than I would have had on my own.

A few more photos from touring the Versailles palace below:

The famous Hall of Mirrors

The palace was full of amazing ceilings like these

And over-the-top four-poster beds like these. Please note the ridiculous feather tufts adorning each corner of the bed canopy. I thought they were so over-the-top frou-frou I couldn't help laughing. And yet? Secretly coveted them for my own bed. Not really. Well kind of. Maybe.

View of the gardens from the palace courtyard. The garden grounds are so large you can barely comprehend it. They extend beyond the end of the rectangular "lake" you see in the distance.

One of my favourite photos that I took from the entire trip to Europe. This is the view looking up towards the palace from a fountain in the palace gardens.