SVong-Along

If you are visiting Paris and Versailles any Saturday between June and September, I recommend buying a combination ticket to the Royal Serenade and Les Grandes Eaux (Fountain and firework show). We visited and got a less crowded walkthrough of the palace (including many of the Salons and the Hall of Mirrors), watched the sunset over the garden, and stayed for an epic firework finale. I'd also recommend staying the night in Versailles if you can get a hotel, as we had to walk a bit to beat the crowd to uber back to Paris. Below are more details of the experience:   We got to the front gate where there were different queues for different start times of the royal serenade, ranging from 6:30 PM til 7:50 pm.  Part 1: Swordfight at the entrance of Versailles (mostly in French, but they said some English words)  Part 2: Serenade in Holy Chapel  Part 3: Dance in the Hall of Mirrors  Afterwards, we saw some of the salons. From 7:30 on we went to the garden. After w...

From Munich we took an overnight train to Paris. The metro kept getting delayed so we had to take a last minute taxi to the train station and we ran to get on our train, but we made it onto the train which left around 3 AM. We got to Paris in the morning, left our stuff at Hotel Ampere which Chanrith booked on Hotwire, and then took public transit to Versailles. Unfortunately, the most convenient train (RER-C) was under construction [late summer/August is not the greatest time to go to France FYI], so we had to take a bus and another metro to get to the station where we could finally take a very packed RER-C to Versailles. It probably took us over an hour to get to Versailles. After getting off the train we walked about 10 minutes to get to the Palace. When we got to Versailles it was PACKED. The line was crazy and it was probably a 3-4 hour wait... for the hoi polloi. Luckily Chanrith is an annual pass holder- so we went to the front and cut the entire line. But still among ...