Wednesday at Versailles.

Just a short train ride outside of Paris, sits the town of Versailles, home to Louis XIV's summer palace.

You know how when you go to Disney World and you're blown away by the detail and the opulence of it all?

That's essentially how I felt walking around Versailles. It was so extreme. So over the top. It was so unbelievable to think that real live, actual people lived like that.

Our initial plan was to spend the first half of our Wednesday at Versailles. After all, part of it's magic is the gardens, which were clearly not blooming in early March. We didn't plan to spend much more than an hour in the main palace and then we assumed it would be a quick walk through Marie Antoinette's smaller palace on the grounds.

We. were. wrong.

Even without spending hours wandering through the Alice in Wonderland type gardens, there was a whole day's worth of royal magic to see. 

Stretching down from the main palace is the Grand Canal, which is open to the public as a park. Runners were our for a jog and crew teams were practicing right along side the tourists in rented row boats. 

We followed the path and stopped along the way for lunch in at a cute wooden cottage.

Then we finally came to the Grand Trianon, which is part of Marie Antoinette's weekend palace.

Oh, what I wouldn't give to have a weekend retreat like this...

It was done in a beautiful pink marble and the interior rooms were enough to take your breath away.

Before coming to France, Marie Antoinette was raised in Austria. Pulling from this she created what is called the Queen's Hamlet and is reminiscent of her homeland. It is basically the backyard of the secondary palace.

Again, I felt like I was walking through a Disney set, not a real place.

Can't you just imagine the seven dwarfs walking out that door?

It was like walking into a foreign land hundreds of years ago.

Down to the farm animals, it is kept up to perfection. 

This was also the place where I developed an obsession with door knob photography. 

They were also so unique and detailed! I took dozens of door knob photos and have since printed them and bought frames. Now I just need to find the perfect wall for display.

By the time we had finished walking every inch of the grounds our feet were toast. It was evening by then and we were ready to head back to the city and sit down for a glass of red wine. To speed up the process we hopped on a super-sized golf cart train to go back to the main palace. 

One more train ride and a few subway stops later, we were back in our Paris neighborhood and our Wednesday was complete.