Fourth Form of Madness

Do you know when you wake up and you just know it is not going to be a good day? I had one of those yesterday.

I have always wanted to see Versailles Palace since I saw a photo of it when I was 9. Finally, I was about to. We arrived at the palace gates at 8.30am. We had previously purchased our tickets online as per the travel guide recommendations. Husband and I proceeded to argue about the parking of the car, it was over the lines and I had suggested it be re-parked. It was one of those travel fights that seems so important at the time and then 5 minutes later you couldn’t give a toss about it (my friend Tanya could attest to this when we were in Spain when I told her to ..”Have back your f…… watch then” – whoops can’t even remember why we were fighting). Between fighting and breakfast it took us up to the 9am open sesame moment of the gates. By time there were quite a gathering at the gates.

Once inside the palace it was well worth the wait. It truly is beautiful. The paintings on the ceilings, the furnishings, the gardens. They give out free tour headsets so I was meandering along nicely clicking buttons and ohing and arhing at the sights and information I was hearing and pretending I was Marie Antoinette fleeing from revoluntionaries when suddenly I realised how crowded I had become and how I was getting jostled along even though the palace is quite large. They were packing her to the rafters with tourists. You couldn’t get near most displays because of large tour groups. At one point, I was standing looking at something when one of the tour guide ladies led her group right up to me and proceeded to wave her tour pointer with a pom pom on top right infront of my face and person. Another time I was doing an extreme close up of a statue of Diana the Huntress (one of my favourite goddesses) when just as I was about to push the button I saw a face that did not belong to Diana in front of my camera – a tourist that had jammed herself between me and Diana. As we were leaving the palace I saw a sight even more incredible than the palace – 100s upon 100s of tourist buses lined up in the car park (if you don’t believe me ask my husband he actually pointed it out, he might not be able to park (hee hee) but he doesn’t exaggerate).

Next we said goodbye to our trusty Ford Fiesta back in Paris and hello to the TGV at Gare de Lyon. This is where I leave my dignity at the door. We went to print out our tickets that we had previously booked back in home. After several attempts it was clear it wasn’t going to work so we needed to find a ticket booth. I spied a sign which led downstairs and had my back turned from my husband, at the same time husband said “Look there is one down those stairs over there’ and had his back turned to me. I thought we were talking about the same stairs so headed off and half way down my stairs before turning around to talk to husband and realising he wasn’t there. My mind did a back take – how did he disappear so quickly, I had just heard him talking to me. I retraced my steps and waited. No husband. My mind immediately remembered “Taken” a Liam Neeson film I had recently watched which was set in Paris and involves girls getting kidnapped and drugged and sold into the sex trade. Admittedly husband isn’t a girl and has been doing martial arts for about 20 years so that fact that this was highly unlikely to have been my husband’s fate didn’t seem to register with my brain. In my mind, he was being drugged and was half way out of the country. I started calling his name out, loudly. I am rather a reserved person but when I think a loved on is being bundled across the French/Spanish border I can become quite boisterous.

Several French people came to see if I was ok and if I needed assistance (even in my kidnapping crisis I did register that this would be a good social experiment between cultures to see which culture rendered assistance in the least time – hee hee). One particularly lovely woman gave me her mobile phone and helped me try and piece together husband’s phone number. My mind was too focussed on husband being in someone’s car boot trying to kick out the lights and go all Chuck Norris on their arse to concentrate on numbers. The poor woman must have thought I was having some mid-life existential crisis right there in Gare de Lyon particularly as I had started to semi-hyperventalate. After what seemed like hours, but husband assured me was only 10 minutes, husband appeared. Of course I immediately did what any relied person does and started yelling at husband – it must have been a very moving scene for the lovely french woman. Husband explained that he too had turned around on his set of steps to speak to me and had been surprised to see me not there. After dismissing the thought that I had been kidnapped as he reasoned no kidnapper would have been able to shift me that fast with the over stuffed backpack I had on my back, he retraced his steps to find me. I had luckily chosen the only part of the train station to stand where I wasn’t visible for the way he was looking. It wasn’t until he approached another way he saw me and my new french friends.

Afterwards, hurtling along at 300mph on the TGV and after my second mini-bottle of Rose, I was able to smile about the ordeal and agree that, granted, I had over reacted and that perhaps I need to cut down on watching action thrillers. Hopefully such like adventures do not await us in Montpellier.