December Part 4 (Dec. 20-21)

Sunday, December 20, was our last full day in Paris. Robin and Dad were pretty tired of doing tourist things, so they decided to stay around the apartment and do some wandering of their own while Bonnie Jo, Mom, Jenny and I went to see the Palace of Versailles, which was the thing Jenny wanted to see most in Paris.

The gates of Versailles

It took us a little while to figure out how to get to Versailles, but we finally managed to get on the right RER train going in the right direction. The journey took about thirty minutes and we got to see some of the area surrounding Paris. It was snowing very hard during the whole train ride, and was still snowing very hard when we got to Versailles.

View out onto the gardens from a window

Versailles was pretty cool, but I was also glad that it was our last day of being full-time tourists. There was a special exhibit about Louis XIV, which was interesting. And the palace is so huge! Unsurprisingly (but still sadly) the gardens were closed due to weather.

The famed Hall of Mirrors

That night was our last night at the apartment in Paris. We had train tickets to go back to Lille for the next day around 4 p.m., so the next morning we got up and finished packing before heading out into Paris one last time. Bonnie Jo, Robin, Jenny and I had wanted to go to the Musee d'Orsay, but it's closed on Mondays, so we ended up going to the Musee de l'Orangerie instead, which is a relatively small museum that focuses on impressionist paintings. It is most famous for housing Matisse's water lily paintings, called the Nympheas. By that point, I was pretty tired of taking pictures, so I didn't take any in there, but we did see some cool paintings.

After we were done at the museum, we all headed back to the apartment to finish getting our stuff together and head to Lille. It was quite an expedition, but we somehow managed to get six people plus all of our luggage from the apartment to the metro (while changing metro lines three times) to the train station on time. But once we got there, our train was missing several cars for one reason or another (you have to love France), so there was a mass of people trying to figure out where they were supposed to sit. Jenny talked to an official-type person who told her we should just get on a first-class car and try to find space. It was all very stressful, but by about 5:30 we were on our way to Lille, with a free seating upgrade. After that, there were no more troubles, and we finally arrived home in Lille!

We spent the next few days leading up to Christmas relaxing, shopping, and getting ready for Christmas, and showing my family around Lille. Even though Paris was a lot of fun, it was good to have a break from all the rushing around and seeing things. But the day after Christmas, we returned to our sightseeing, which I will get to in a later post.