Paris part 2 Versailles

Let me start out by saying that we have TONS of pictures of Versailles so this is really the bare bare summary. We almost got lost taking the train there and were saved by the SWEETEST group of women traveling together. This was Camille. She reminded me so much of Auntie H with her southern drawl and all. She was traveling with her daughter, daughter's partner, and grandaughter. We had the best time visiting the palace almost the whole day with them. What a fun group!!

This is us before we bought our tickets with Camille.

In front of Versailles. The place is MASSIVE!!! And the gardens are acre upon acre. We also had our first "friendly" french experience here. We were in the cafeteria and had finally collected enough chairs and table space to sit with our new group of friends for lunch when a french man came over to us yelled something in French and took two of our chairs! Gotta love those "friendly" french!

This is us in the famous hall of mirrors.

Another very impressive room was the war room. They had all these HUGE paintings showing the famous wars of France. This picture makes it look so small but it was massive as well! The crazy thing is that they had an exhibit showing pictures of the realities of war in current times because all the paintings were really glorifying battle.

And on to the gardens which was my favorite part.

There were so many fountains!!

And the statues were all so big!

This is the main stretch.

And we walked what seemed like a mile to get to Marie Antoinette's little get away.

Little....yeah right?!

I really liked her "little" house. It was very classy and not super super gawdy like the palace was. Just french country.

This was a little pavilion in her "little" garden that would have taken us hours to walk.

Not all the fountains were on today. There were so many little alcoves of the garden to get lost in. We didn't even see 1/50th of it all. I loved it!

We did find our own little alcove in the garden. We found a bench to sit on and just relaxed. There was no one around and there were TONS of people there. That's how big the gardens were. And it was SILENT!

We couldn't get far enough away to get a picture of the whole palace. We could only take panoramic shots. So here is us with about half of the palace.

From the terrace of the palace.

I loved the design of this garden.

And there were all kinds of little terraces around.

After a LONG full day at Versaille, a train station closure, about 12 miles of walking including an long unexpected one to get to another train station, a train that was almost an hour late, and getting LOST trying to find our hotel after asking about 5 different people and them each telling us a DIFFERENT way, we ate dinner. We found this place that made crepes with all kinds of stuff inside them. We each got a dinner crepe with chicken and cheese and a bunch of other stuff and THIS was dessert. YUM!! God bless the person who invented crepes and nutella!

Paris part 1

And we finally make it to our last city...PARIS!! I was so excited! We arrived late afternoon so we didn't see a whole lot the first day.

You may recognize the tower.

Again with the kissing thing? Really?

Notre Dame. I was dying to see this place! I have wanted to go ever since the first time I saw it in 3rd grade! Loved it!

The famous rose window.

That is the organ. The sound is amazing!! We actually got to sit in on a mass a few days later. Those pics will come soon. But the sound inside is amazing!

I'm in Notre Dame!! Ahhh!! The whole time I was like this!

Close up of one of the rose windows. There are two.

The choir.

Outside looking up from the side.

And who could that be?? Yep...Quasimodo himself!

In the gardens.

Speaking of Quasimodo...

Nice picture of the buttresses and outside one of the rose windows.

Europe Part 7-Paris...COMING!

I have TONS of pictures from Paris so it gonna take a little while to go through them. So...patience please. I'm working on it. It's the final part of the Europe saga. Then I will get on to posting pictures of the new house and our trip to visit family in Utah.

Europe Trip Part 6 - Switzerland

OK..first of all..Switzerland was SO BEAUTIFUL!! This section of the post doesn't show a 20th of how many pictures we took here! It was amazing! We hope to go back again soon! This is in Lucerne Switzerland. We started our journey here off with a boat cruise on the lake.

There are castles all along the lake. I didn't show half of them in this post.

The mountains surrounding the lake were amazing!

Our hotel....JK! I wish! This is a 6 star hotel on the lake. It looks very Swiss!

And another famous luxury hotel.

The view of Lucerne from the boat.

Not sure why but every time we asked someone to take our picture they wanted us to kiss. I think they thought we were on our honeymoon or something. Well...6 years later...we can have a couple right?

Another castle. Unfortunately it had started to rain here so some of the pictures look a little gray.

This was a statue of Jesus that a very wealthy women who lived on the lake donated after she made a promise to God that if he healed her from a major illness she had, she would do something for the people of Lucerne to remember him. It's really big!

This is me with my pal Anne. She was a hoot!! We were stretching our legs after getting off the bus and I started singing songs from The Sound of Music and Anne began singing too. Before we knew it her husband put down a hanky and people from the tour started making donations. Then we started dancing. Anne got a little carried away. LOL Love her!

This was a cool old bridge in the city by the river which was really RUSHING by.

Us on the bridge. This town was so pretty!

Umm...that might be me yodeling...

Look at how amazing these Swiss chocolates are! Do I see a Boston B?

Look at how cute this street is!? This is the cutest town!

The Weeping Lion Monument in honor of fallen Swiss soldiers. It was really breathtaking!

Raargh...

This part is a little out of order. This is a church by our hotel.

We took a walk by the lake and found this bench on a hill with a waterfall close by. It was really picturesque.

Anne took this picture for us. Just chilling...

This was one of the highlights of our trip. He we are at the base of Mt. Stanserhorn. This is a railway that takes us part way up the mountain before we take a cable car the rest of the way up.

It was very authentic with the curtains and everything. Here we are climbing with Lucerne in the distance.

Me with the conductor. Unfortunately I wasn't able to drive.

Here we are in the cable car with another going back down past us. It was a little scary!

View of the hills.

We passed this amazing rainbow on our way.

These are the old gears for the cable car that they had displayed.

Looking over the mountains. This place was cool because on the silver plates behind us they had arrow pointing to how far it was in that direction to major cities around the world. They had San Francisco. It was over 4,000 miles away!

The other side of the range from the observation deck.

The green color when the sun was shing was amazing!

And even when it started raining! I can't describe how pretty it was!

Yep...trying to fit into the Swiss culture.

Green Hills!!!

Hills, lakes, valleys, and mountains.

We took a little hike around the top to see what we could see and then it was back down and off to our hotel. It was a breathtaking day!!