Paris Day Trips

Mont St. Michel

Although we had almost nine whole days in Paris (which was not nearly enough), we spent a bit of time outside of Paris, which was a nice city break.

The only picture from Versailles without people in it...

Our first day in Paris we spent at the Palace of Versailles. While Versailles was everything I imagined it to be (beautiful and massive with gorgeous gardens), I did not have fun there at all and would probably never go back except in the dead of winter when there's hardly anyone there.

Cute little cloister at Mont St. Michel

We actually didn't have to wait in line for as long as I expected, but I think they need to regulate more strictly the number of people inside the palace, because when we were inside, it was so crowded and there were Asian tour groups everywhere. It was awful. Walking around the gardens was very nice though, and if you aren't super interested in seeing the interior, I would skip it unless you are there in off season.

Mont St. Michel

Another trip we took was to Mont St. Michel, a little monastery island in Normandy where only 44 people live. I learned about this place in French class years ago, and ever since, its been one of the top things on my list to see in France. The problem is, its not very easy to get to, and we spent more time waiting for transportation than actually in Mont St Michel. This is definitely a place that is best traveled to by car.

I was distracted the whole dinner by the
cow eating Sarah's head.

That being said, Mont St Michel was really beautiful, especially from the mainland, and it was a very peaceful and relaxing place to visit. Once you get across the causeway to the island, you walk through a tiny village consisting of very expensive restaurants (we're talking minimum of 4€ for a crepe) and souvenir shops and that's all. Then you go up to the abby at the very top of the island, and that was really cool. Lucky for us the abby was on strike, so we didn't have to pay to see it haha. One time when strikes were a good thing. After touring the abby we sat on a stone wall and enjoyed the view for a while before heading home.

Can anyone tell me why there are French soldiers
with big guns at all the train stations?!

Part of the Paris Museum Pass was this little château Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris. Since some trees fell down at the Fontainebleau château, they closed the whole castle for the day, so we went to Vincennes instead.

Vincennes

Sarah was really excited because it was a legit medieval castle, even though it was pretty small. We climbed a lot of spiral staircases there and made friends with the castle cat, who was extremely friendly and loved being pet, but did not like french baguette.

Love Chartres!!

South of Paris is a small town called Chartres, and if you've heard of it, its probably because of Chartres cathedral, which is basically all that is there. If you don't know, I love Gothic cathedral architecture and wrote a ten page paper on the architectural advances of Gothic cathedrals as seen in Chartres - so it was pretty awesome to see it in person. After explaining a bunch of stuff about the cathedral to Sarah, which I'm pretty sure she did not care about at all, we did a little photoshoot in the cathedral's back yard / garden area and headed back to Paris.

Photoshoot at Chartres