In Paris, we visited the Palace of Versailles. Oh my, I think if you ever see one palace in your life this has to be the one. It is just INSANE. It’s beyond huge, and no expense is spared at any corner. It’s truly a masterpiece. But, that’s for another post.

Before we left on our trip, I decided to watch Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst, for my history of the French monarchy. Yeah, I realize this movie probably wasn’t exactly historically accurate but my tolerance of reading historical information is pretty low, and the entertainment factor was there. It definitely helped give me some context to what we were seeing as we visited the palace.

The movie starts off on a sour note – Marie crosses the border of France from Austria, where she is from, and she is traveling with her little dog on her lap. Well, she gets to the border and the mom (or whoever was picking her up, I forget) TAKES HER DOG AWAY and tells her she can have as many FRENCH dogs as she likes! Of course Marie-Antoinette cries and cries. Are you kidding me? That pretty much sets the tone of Marie-Antoinette’s life as an Austrian turned French monarch.

So, after awhile, Marie-Antoinette decides she needs somewhere to hide from all these bitchy monarch people. She creates a farm that’s far enough away that nobody really wants to walk to it, but there’s also a huge fence and a moat like thing to keep people out. It took us like an hour of hiking around to even find the entrance – we were so tired at the end of this day. She basically created a farm where she could live a more basic and peaceful life. They have the entire thing set up as a farm and you can see the outsides of the buildings:

And of course, there were tons of animals and crops to see. The most exciting part for me was the little bunny grotto. There were probably around 20 bunnies, and they had a little fenced off wooded area. So cute. These two were grooming each other like crazy:

Oh, and a final bunny note: Oak actually ate a “terrine du lapin” when we were in South France. I didn’t have any but he said it tasted like chicken. Go figure. I am pretty sure Radar knew that Oak ate it because the day we came home, he dug at Oak’s belly like he was very angry about what was inside of it. haha. Happy Easter!

Posted by Carrie on Sunday, April 24, 2011
Categories: blog, travel · No Comments »