You picked the wrong person to cut in line in front of.

Versailles....I hate this place.  I know it's like amazing, great......   Last time I left exhausted and understanding the French revolution, now I've left and I can say with some certainty I will never go back. 

I know nice way to start things off.  Now I have been to Disneyland over a holiday, stood in line for season tickets, and Heaven knows I've been to Costco a time or two.  But this line, this line took the cake.  It snaked 100+yard at least 6x's(at least 600 yards of line), not an exaggeration.  It took us like 10 minutes to find the end of the line.  But let me back up the day started off with a plan.

Todd, as always had a better plan.  Somehow avoid Versailles by flying to Munich to visit a friend.  And then somehow arrange all this planning and scheduling so that Versailles lands on a day he's gone.  Brilliant I now realize.  So off Todd went in the wee hours of the morning(9:30, I know but we're like on vacation here.)  So then the kids and I finally get ready with Grandma and make our way to the metro. You have to take a different RER train to Versailles which is about 20 miles outside Paris.  So with some slight confusion we figure that out and get on the train.  All seems great, the weather is nice, the train is not totally packed, and we all have made it.  We walk to the front of Versailles and BAM, there it is Wall of People.  It's so many people that I don't even recognize it's a line until we get the the front of it and it's snake like appearance shows.  It takes Marcia 5 seconds to announce she'll be sitting on a bench she's already scoped out near the entrance waiting for me.  In fact I have to run after her to leave the boys with her.  The girls and I huff on down the hill and try to find the end of the line.  Eventually we do and we wait, and wait, and wait, and eat, and eat, and eat, and push, and push, and cry, and cry, and finally we make it to the end an hour and 45 minutes later and do you know what happens? Another American couple in their 50's tries to just blend into the line right next to us.  I don't know if they missed the exasperated look on my face but they should have known this was not a safe place to try to sneak in line.  So I kindly ask them if they realize the line starts 600 yards back.  They tell me they already have tickets, I tell them this is the already have tickets line, they ignore me.  I tell them again they should go get in line where it starts, they ignore me again(now they don't speak English I guess.)  So I smile at the guard at the entrance and tell him in my best most polite pseudo French that these people have just cut in line...he throws them out.  I am now happy. 

But the happiness passes when I realize that they have crammed the 600 yards of people into the "Chateau"  I think when the French revolution took place and they came to pillage the place fewer people were in there.  So we trotted through, got glimpses of how the lucky few lived.  All joking aside the place is really beautiful and if it could be seen as it should be with fewer people smashed in it would be one of the prettiest sights I have seen.  But not today.  Today it was just a test of my nerves and patience.  The real kicker was that we happen to be there on a summer weekend where to turn on the fountains.  This would be cool but then you have to pay another 8 Euros per person(including kids) so just go into the gardens(which are actually in my opinion the coolest part.)  So when we discovered that I pulled the plug.  There were just too many people there to even bother and Todd's mom would not have enjoyed the long walk it would have taken to get to the other parts of the grounds she wanted to see.  

We took the metro home, ate hot dogs, took baths(this was a necessity as the girls spent the last hour in line rolling in the dirt.)  and hanging out.  

Truthfully I would love to see Versailles....because I still don't think I saw it at all but I think I'd have to be the Queen of France or something where I'd be the only one there...and as that's not going to happen I'm thinking this may be my last visit.  

Line waiters

Row 2/6

Mom can we go?