Day 108, 20 October 2012, Versailles - A first trip to Paris wouldn't be complete without a visit to the Palace of Versailles. And despite it being the very end of the high season and a cold drizzly day, just us and a few 1000 other visitors made the pilgrimage. It's amazing that this huge complex is only 45 minutes on the train from central Paris and gee - we are getting so good at zipping around on the metros and trains. The utter luxury and decadence of Versailles is intense, but not so overwhelming as if we'd seen it on day 1 rather than day 7 of our time in Paris. We can see that they were certainly enjoying life, back in the day. But we can also see how the royals "had it coming". The fountains were accompanied by classical music during our visit so after we viewed the Chateau we walked through the many groves and gardens and enjoyed the hazy gray of the day. When all the luxury got to the royals they came up with a great concept and built themselves a couple of holiday houses on the estate - about 1.5 km walk from the main Chateau. These were called the Grand Trianon and Petit Trianon. They were beautiful and due to the walk, essentially peaceful because the main scrums in the Chateau were created by the bus loads of tourists which could be easily categorised by age group (the retirees type tours) or language (the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, Spanish tours) and then there was little old us squirming through the hordes. We gave in for the trip back to the Chateau however and tootled along on the Petit Train. We can only take so much gilding and chandeliers in a day without getting the urge to move in, so we headed home in the afternoon for a final late lunch at our local Moroccan favourite and then it was time for packing and travel bookings. Final train trip for venture to the Isle of Skye in the New Year (booked. finally.) Starting to investigate the train to Machu Picchu in June 2013. Right... packing. Experience has shown it won't do itself, so we best get to it.