Versailles!

On Sunday, we headed over to Versailles for the day. After we sat around and waited for the train to show up, we got on with all the other tourists headed to the Palace. It only took about thirty minutes to get there and then we found our way through town and somehow ended up at the front of the line and made our way into the Palace of Louis XIV.

We made our way through the Palace in about an hour and a half. We occasionally got stuck in a small room with a tour group that was blocking anyone from moving through the room. We finally made it past all the huge meeting rooms, the throne room, and all the King's private apartments to see the famous Hall of Mirrors! It was pretty impressive. There were a ton of chandeliers and the mirrors were huge. Then after that we made our way out to the gardens. The fountains started to run on the weekends just the week before we got out there. The gardens were huge, so after walking through some of them we got some lunch and sat by the lake and watched all the people.

After lunch we headed out to Marie Antoinette's Estate. She had her own seperate mansion about a mile from the palace. She also had a lake, a river, and a whole seperate little village built for her behind the mansion. They say she wanted to be able to escape the royal life and go for walks along the lake and through the "Hamlet" she had built in 1783. It was a beautiful rustic set of houses along the lake.

So, by the time we had seen Marie Antoinette's Estate, I think we had walked 10 miles and we still had to make our way back through the gardens to the Palace. We wandered back along the Grand Canal in the gardens. We even got to stop for some ice cream along the way, and then the fountains turned back on for us to take their pictures!

After we dilly dallied for about another hour we were both exhausted and hungry, so we left the palace to find some dinner. We walked through the town for about thirty minutes and then gave up and hit up McDonald's for dinner. After eating we were spent, so we headed back to the hotel and hit the hay.

Hope that wasn't too many fountain pictures!

Paris

Our next stop on the European vacation was just down the road to Paris! This did involve crossing the English Channel, which meant we got to take the train through the Chunnel! It was mostly uneventful, just dark for about 15 or 20 minutes, then we were in France!

Once in Paris, we made our way to our hotel, and luckily it was right off the Metro. When we got there our room wasn't quite ready, so we left our bags and we took a stroll to find some lunch, and the Eiffel Tower! We sat in the park right under the tower and enjoyed being in Paris.

After lunch we got checked in and showered and then since it was Friday, the Louvre was open late (until 9!) so we figured this was the best way to get the most for our museum money, so we were off. We found our way along the Metro once again, and the Louvre Metro stop puts you right underneath the museum, and you even pass a little shop which sells tickets, so we skipped a line already! The main lobby of the museum is quite intimidating, there are three wings with an entrance for each wing, and tons of people. Rick Steves said that this was the slow time, I would hate to see it busy. Fortunately they had a free map that included a dozen or so highlights, so we wandered off and found all kinds of cool stuff. They had Da Vinci paintings, the Venus de Milo sculpture, the Code of Hammurabi tablet, and little painting by the name of the Mona Lisa. And I think little might be a accurate description of the Mona Lisa, I think it was probably a 12 inch x 18 inch painting. I mean it was exciting to see and all, but it was teenie!

Then on Saturday we had reservations to go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and once again we saw huge crowds to fight through, so we planned to get there a little bit before our reservation time. Fortunately, because we had the reservation we were able to skip almost all of the line at the bottom of the tower, but it did nothing for the lines once we got on the tower! The first elevator ride was uneventful, and the first stop wasn't that high according to Mikey, but still had some great views. Once we looked around for a few minutes, we jumped in line for the second elevator to go all the way to the top! Seems we could see all the way back to London from there!

That night we went up to Montmartre, one of the hills of the city that has the Basilica Sacre Coeur on the top of it. We got some great views of the Eiffel Tower all lit up and sparkling. We ate some cheese and bread for dinner, and eventually walked down to see the Moulin Rouge, which was only mildly exciting.









Sunday we took the train down to Versailles, but since Versailles isn't really Paris, please see the next blog post! (It's almost ready to be posted, I promise)

After Versailles, we wanted to check out the rest of the city that we hadn't seen yet, which involved taking a little stroll over to the Rue Cler and then seeing the Military Museum, but then we had to make our way down the Champs-Elysees, and look for landmarks from the Tour De France. We took a few pictures of the Arc de Triomphe and then made our way down the Champs-Elysees towards the Louvre. Once we got close to the Louvre, we hit up a public restroom, and I broke it twice... silly things that rinse after each use... Anyways, during our stroll we found some delicious snacks!! So we sat and ate and then we went over to see the Notre Dame. We sat in Notre Dame for a little while and then I took a million pictures and then Mikey got bored so we made our way back the Rue Cler for an Italian restaurant we saw early during the day.

And I think that about wraps up Paris! Well, except us almost missing our train back to London, but who really wants to hear about us going through the super valued members line and then jogging to the very other end of the train and having three minutes to spare once we sat down. Well, I thought it was wonderful and even with the warnings of Paris being really dirty, I didn't seem to mind too much, maybe some day we will go back for a boat cruise along the Parisian canals!

Here are our favorite night time pictures of the Eiffel Tower!

London

So seeing how London was all over the news yesterday I feel like I should get started on our blog about London. And what did you think about Kate's dress? Gorgeous, elegant or just so so?? I like it! I liked her sister's dress better though...

Anyways, we got to London on Tuesday around lunch time and hopped the Heathrow Connect to head to Paddington Station, which was a five minute walk from our hotel! We got checked in and showered and headed to Afternoon Tea at the Georgian Restaurant in Harrod's. Thanks to Jan's suggestion on where to go, we had a delightful time and ate more sandwiches and scones with clotted cream and jelly than I can count! It was wonderful. After that we wandered around Harrod's and then headed back to our hotel to call it a night, we were exhausted.

The following morning, we were up and ready to explore the whole city. After we talked to the owner of the hotel, we got the day pass for the Tube and went just about everywhere! We started off by going to see the British Museum. We saw the Rosetta Stone and a lot of the Egyptian and Greek sections, but then we were evacuated because the fire alarm started to go off. According to the news over 8000 people were evacuated! We walked outside to two fire trucks pulling up and decided we might as well go see something else and maybe we would make it back. We never went back.

But we headed down to the London Eye for our reservation that we had made for the afternoon, since we were a bit early, we walked over to Big Ben and Parliament and even stopped to get some Nutella covered strawberries! After we waited around and had lunch we took our ride on the Eye. It was pretty cool to see all the city from the top and it is definitely worth it! After that we wandered down to the Tower of London and thought about going in, but decided not to since it was so late in the day and it was kind of pricey. So we made our way over to Buckingham Palace to look around there. It was pretty much closing down for the day, so we decided to head up the Piccadilly Circus and see what was going on up there. We got some fish and chips at a pub nearby! They were good, but nothing to make a special trip to London for, maybe we will have to make a special trip to Ireland to compare! Then we headed back home.









Then on day two we decided we would make it a priority to go see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, and apparently so did every other tourist in town! It was packed! We could see some stuff, but could not really hear anything except the band. We ended up moving around a bit, along the front of Buckingham Palace and could see a little bit more of the Foot Guards, but were still pretty far away. After that we wandered our way over to Trafalgar Square and took some pictures of the Lions. There were lots of restaurants and little places to eat, so we got some sandwiches and ate in the square with the pigeons and tourists.

Then we headed down the road towards Westminster Abbey. Along the way we saw the Horse Stables and Downing Street and then spent some time looking around the outside of the Abbey. We thought about going back to the British Museum, but instead decided to see if we could get tickets to see a show in Piccadilly Circus that night. We looked for tickets for Les Mis, Mama Mia and a few others, but all the tickets were sold out, except the really expensive ones, so we passed. We went back to our hotel and got packed for a train ride to Paris, since we had to leave the hotel around 5AM to get to the station in time. So we got packed, the hotel owner told us of some good restaurants just up the road, on London Street, including an Italian place, so we walked over there and had a lovely time. We even saw the hotel owner eating there with her family! Because we had to get up so early, we took the bus around town to try to find a grocery store to get something for breakfast the in morning.

And that about wraps up our time in London, we did a lot of walking and a lot of sight seeing in two days. It went really fast! Stay tuned for PARIS!!!

We're back

The silence recently has not been due to a lack of interesting things to blog about, but it has been because we were in Europe for two weeks!!! OK, most of you probably know that already, but I still really enjoy saying it. We spent a few days in London, Paris and Istanbul, and the next few blogs will be dedicated to the highlights of each city.

Now, before you start to avoid our calls or turn down invites for dinner, we won't subject anyone to all of our pictures (there are about 2500 of them), so we'll just post the highlights here and Julie and I will look through the pictures as we plan our next adventure.

While we get organized, here are some quick highlights of each stop, with more to come in the next few days.

Julie getting a little close to the lions in Trafalgar Square:


This one really doesn't need a caption:


And this is just one of the many very cool things that we did in Istanbul:


More to come!