Literally running – the hotel thoughtfully supplied my favourite dreadmills in the fitness centre!!!!!  What a time to be alive.

I highly recommend considering a tour with Paris City Vision if you’re short on time and like everything planned ahead when you sightsee.  The photo above is of the line for general ticket holders waiting for entry to the palace at around 9am.

The line only got longer as the day progressed.

Pascale also drove us expertly from our hotels onwards to all our destinations on the tour.  Groups are small – mine totalled six visitors and it was great fun getting to know people from other parts of the world and sharing our travel stories during the drive and over lunch.  It was also interesting to discover Paris beyond the city centre.  The area around the palace is now mostly residential and a highly desired place to live.

Looking toward the marble court inside the palace grounds.

In his youth, Louis XIV imagined himself as an extension of Greek mythology and many of the portraits and sculptures commissioned of him in these early years do feature this motif strongly.

The painting above is part of the State Room where the palace tour begins.  It’s a representation of the history of France politically from the time of the French Revolution.  The King is that upper left corner, in the shadows while the church don’t seem to fare much better with their bottom left, heads down position.

If you look closely at the photo below you can just make out the secret door in the wall between the chair and the cabinet.  It leads to another room whose name escapes me but strangely, it was definitely not the King’s room.

A portrait of Louis XIV aged in his sixties.  The obsession with Greek mythology now a distant memory as the king breaks with tradition and reveals his legs and the stacked heels of his boots.  He was not a tall man so revealing ‘the secret’ to his height and his true physique in an official portrait were probably both humbling decisions.  That trademark big hair remains though.

 If I had this view from my windows at home, I don’t think I’d ever want to leave.  Not even for coffee….

I have no word to describe the Hall of Mirrors except breathtaking.

The mirrors of the wall were a world first when the room was constructed.  Making even the smallest mirror at the time was expensive and complicated but somehow Louis XIV found people to make bigger mirrors happen.  Then he lined an entire hall with them.  He was also the first man in history to be able to view himself in a full-length mirror.

The final room of our tour pays homage to Napolean and is fittingly called the Coronation Room.

A moment please to behold the magnificence of the Orangerie garden.

It takes a good half an hour to power walk from the palace to the perimeter of the garden.  Shooting practice from a nearby military base gave my mission a bit of purpose.

At around 11am, the fountains spring to life with a soundtrack of classical music.

The Colonnade Bosquet can be found at the end of one grove of the garden.

There were too many groves to explore in the time I had at Versailles.  Though future me is dreaming of a retirement return to Versailles so that I can find a B&B in the area and tackle a section of the garden on each day of my stay.  With the future equivalent of Airpods stuck in my years and possibly an Alpine walking stick in each hand, I see myself striding with purpose up and down those groves.  Possibly chatting away in French and quite likely in some activewear…..