Off not too early, it is vacation after all, and up to the Arc de Triomphe to buy Museum passes. This little gem costs about the same as admission to three museums but gets you into as many as you can stand to visit in four days. And the extra bonus is you get to skip the lines, there's always a shorter line or separate entrance for pass holders.
Then subway and train out to the Château de Versailles. The lines were immense... but we had the Museum pass! Woo hoo! Skipped ahead of hundreds of people!
Versailles was pretty ... stunning. One of the first things we saw was the royal chapel. In the royal chapel, the king sat above the main floor and in the back of the room. But the members of the court sat facing the king with their backs to the altar. The artwork and decoration work all through the place is non-stop. There's no such thing as a plain ceiling or wall, everything is gilt and paintings and tapestries.
The gardens are immense, literally miles from the palace to the end of the cruciform lake. It's hard to imagine how much of the country's wealth went into building and upkeep of the place.
One of the things we took along were some free audio tours from Rick Steves' website. We had some difficulty with the Versailles one. One reason was that it was a little hard to follow, the other reason was that Alice had her player on shuffle!
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