Our second last day in France and we’d planned a cycling trip of the gardens of Versailles. Up and off by 7.30am, we  met our group at The Fat Bike Tyre Company at rue Edgar Faure, 15th arrondissement at 8.45am and headed off to catch our train with Drew, our guide for the day. A 40 minute train trip later, we arrived in the town of Versailles and dispersed to buy our picnic lunch (le pique-nique) at the weekly market. Baguette, ham, compté (which is a hard cheese, absolutely delicious and ridiculously expensive in Australia, but ridiculously cheap in France!), camembert, cherry tomatoes,  strawberries and rillettes de canard (duck) found their way into our basket (le panier). Rillettes are delicious. Often made from pork, but also can be made from duck, goose, chicken, game birds or rabbit. The meat is  chopped, salted quite heavily and cooked slowly in fat until it is tender enough to be easily shredded, and then cooled with enough of the fat to form a paste, which can then be easily spread on bread. Not something I’d eat every day, but it’s great to have as a treat. Since we were going to be riding bikes for most of the day, we figured we could allow ourselves a few extra calories. I love a picnic. Amazing memories are created when you get out of the house, sit on a rug in the sunshine and talk about all and sundry. No work problems, no deadlines, no fussy food – simple suits me. Picnics are food for your stomach and food for your soul, and particularly so in a place such as this.

After selecting our bikes, we road through the streets of Versailles and into the historic palace park lands, which cover an area of approximately 1000 hectares. The gardens and park lands were a huge undertaking and took 40 years to complete, requiring an enormous amount of work and money. Vast amounts of earth had to be shifted to lay out the flower beds, the Orangerie, the fountains and the canal, where there were previously only woods, grasslands and marshes.  The earth was transported in wheelbarrows and fully grown trees were conveyed by cart from all the provinces of France. Even the water to fill the lake was transported by a specially made viaduct, from Paris. Thousands of men, sometimes whole regiments, took part in this massive enterprise. Louis XIV moved court from Paris to Versailles in 1682 and also decreed that members of the nobility should move there too. A bit of a control freak, old Louis,  as he didn’t trust them, so it meant he could keep his eye on them  And to argue with or ignore the Sun King would mean losing their heads (leurs têtes), so the previously small town of Versailles grew quite substantially during that time. However, due to it’s isolation, it also meant that Louis, not a great money manager by all accounts and with a national debt fast increasing, was somewhat indifferent to any unrest building with the masses in Paris. It’s easy to see the reasons for the french revolution,  after visiting Versailles. The extent of the palace, the vastness of the gardens and the obscenity of wealth spent is very blatant and it’s understandable why it invoked major unrest, given the poverty of the majority of the population at that time. After Louis XIVth death, his grandson, Louis XV took over. While he did some good things during his reign, he was also renowned for the lavish parties and the ‘allegedly’ 300 (yes, 300!) mistresses he had.

In any case, clearly he didn’t direct enough focus to running the country as, by the time poor Louis XVI ascended to the throne, France was in a miserable financial state, nearing bankruptcy, so ultimately he paid the price for the mismanagement of his predecessors.

And his wife, Marie Antoinette, was so disliked that when her turn came to have her head taken off, she was placed face up and the blade of the guillotine, normally razor sharp, was changed to a blunt one, so that it took multiple attempts to get the job done. Lovely….

Anyway, enough of the history lesson, let’s get back to riding bikes around Versailles!  We had a fantastic day, riding a total of 16 klms around the parkland and gardens, through avenues of linden trees, and then spent another hour walking throughout the château. We finally arrived home at 8.30pm, exhausted but very happy.