Day 50: Rental Car, Palace of Versailles, Castle Airb&b

Tuesday, October 15th

We wake up after little sleep, but we are ready to go! We start our day with a nice workout. We snag a coffee and sandwich to share from Brioche Doree. This has become one of my favorite convenient sandwich shops!

We pack up & bring our luggage down to the front desk then head to walk to pick up our rental car. On our walk we discover more beautiful little parts of Paris. There’s something new & exciting around every corner, an arc, a beautiful church, or simply a cute cafe full of flowers.

We got a Fiat for our rental car. It’s perfect size & brand new! We love it. We immediately start laughing, because we have to drive on the right side of the road again, which is backwards to us. Australia, New Zealand, Bali, and the United Kingdom were all on the left side.

The first street we pulled on to, Christopher begins to panic. He yells, BABE HELP!!! I had my eyes on the road and assured him he was on the right side. Luckily, no cars were coming, because he flipped it around & did a u-turn in the middle of the road. We were dying laughing. Who knew driving on the right side of the road would be so backwards. Shortly into our drive, Christopher said it was like riding a bike, & he was back to his confident self.

We head straight to Versailles. It was an easy drive. The town is lovely. I’m so happy we arrived a couple hours before our time slot. We booked for 4:30, because it’s all they had left. Pro tip, book in advance! Luckily we were still able to get a ticket the day of, but I’m not sure if that’s always the case. They are also closed on Mondays!

We stopped by Starbucks for a coffee and our typical ham & cheese sandwich, and then we walked around to explore.

It’s my lucky day…We stumbled across my favorite dessert shop. Aux Merveilleux de Fred and snagged two mini treats for dessert later.

Versailles was far better than I remembered. I came here over 10 years ago with my family, but we weren’t able to go inside. The Palace is GORGEOUS! I love seeing the bedrooms. We had so much fun exploring all of inside and the gardens, laughing the entire time. We spent over 3 hours here, and it didn’t seem like enough, but we needed to hit the road!

We now have almost a 4 hour drive to our airbnb. Christopher thought he’d be playing it safe by stopping at a McDonald’s, but we ended up at one of the worst ones ever. We waited so long for our food it was comical. Laughter cures everything. Then we ran into a grocery store next to it to grab me a salad, sandwich, and waters for the both of us.

We stayed in an old castle in Bretenière, France. It was full of character. They still had the original floors from 1770! This was one of our favorite stays thus far. We were immediately ready for bed since it was past midnight.

My highlights today were seeing the horses armor in the palace and arriving at our cute little Airbnb. Oh also, saying WOW at everything in the palace. I kept saying it in a funny voice the whole time, and Christopher would go “who’s this guy” at almost every statue. Christopher’s highlight was seeing the town of Versailles. The streets were lined perfectly with trees, and the leaves were changing colors. Fall in Paris is quite a site to see.