Versailles and The Louvre
On Tuesday we had walked over 17,000 steps according to my IPhone and I knew that Wednesday was going to be close to that number since we were doing both Versailles and The Louvre.
The hotel ordered us a taxi and off to Versailles we went and that might have been the highlight of the trip for me. The Arc de Triomphe is located just north of the Eiffel Tower inside of a roundabout.
In the US a roundabout might be two or even three lanes wide but they are clearly marked. This roundabout was at least five lanes wide and there were no markings. Our taxi driver hit that roundabout at about 30 MPH and withins seconds we had either almost hit two cars or they had almost hit us as he made his way to the center of the roundabout to then move all the way to the edge to exit the roundabout. We did not even go half way around it.
For me that was a lot of fun. If my wife had been with me my arm might have gotten a good workout from her trying to crush it. I am also the boring CPA that has a need for speed. I used to have a BMW K1200S motorcycle that had 180 horsepower and I actually got it to top speed once. I will let you look it up if you want to know what that speed might be. Going through the roundabout was almost as much fun as doing 150 on my bike (which is not the top speed).
Finally we arrived at Versailles. One word – Massive. The grounds are a little over two miles long and about a mile wide. It started as a hunting lodge by King Louis XIII and King Louis XIV really expanded it by adding several large wings. When you tour the buildings it is really a bunch of paintings with men who have really long wild hair. I don’t know if that was there resl hair or a wig but I guessing it took an hour to wash and dry it.
Gage and I spent most of our time there walking the gardens which are huge. Not many flowers but lots of ponds and a big lake that had several people in boats. A game of hide and seek with a 1,000 people could easily be done in these gardens.
Finally off to the Louvre. This became a museum in the late 1,700 and if you really like to look at paintings this is the place for you. There are also many sculptures including the famous Venus de Milo.
Gage and I roamed this place for a couple hours going up and down lots of stairs. Our final step count for the day was a little over 17,000 and I feel like 5,000 of them were stair steps.
Several of the paintings were easily over 1,000 square feet. Being that Gage and I are not what you call art lovers we finally hiked over to take a quick peek at the Mona Lisa and got out of there. Or at least tried to. Being your typical museum we had go through both a gift shop and a mall before we could leave. But we made it out unharmed.
As I write this we are about ready to head to the train station to go to Basel. We will be going out of Paris Gare Lyon which only has 22 tracks and serves about 110,000,000 people per year. It is the second busiest train station in France.
When i get back to the states and a real computer I will do a final post on the trip.
Paul Neiffer is a certified public accountant and business advisor specializing in income taxation, accounting services, and succession planning for farmers and agribusiness processors. Paul is a principal with CliftonLarsonAllen in Walla Walla, Washington, as well as a regular speaker at national conferences and contributor at agweb.com. Raised on a farm in central Washington, he has been immersed in the ag industry his entire life, including the last 30 years professionally. Paul and his wife purchase an 180 acre ranch in 2016 and enjoy keeping it full of animals.
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