Paris, Day Cinq: Bikes, a picnic and our Last Supper

On our final full day in France, we took a Fat Tire Bike Tour to Versailles.  Kern and I are both professed bike lovers, so it only made sense to incorporate that into our trip.

We met at the Fat Tire offices in Paris, boarded the RER train as a group and picked up our bikes in the town of Versailles.  Once we were fitted with the best bike, we rode to the town market and had about 30 minutes to select bread, wine and cheese for our picnic lunch.

The grounds of Versailles are vast--there is no way to see it all on foot.

We stopped periodically and our guide shared fascinating historical facts with the group.

It was hard to wait for lunch with a perfect baguette beckoning us from the basket of Kern's bike, so we filmed a little video entitled, "Who nibbled le baguette?"

Heavenly lunch: chewy baguette, salami, cheese, fresh strawberries and a dark chocolate tart

Kern picked me a bouquet of wildflowers

After about four hours on the bike, it was time to actually enter the Palace.

The gilding you see in this photo is actual gold--they got about a fourth of the way through re-gilding it in 2008 but stopped when that whole "financial crisis thing" started.  A wise idea considering the original gilding was all taken down/stolen/sold by angry peasants a few hundred years ago in that whole French Revolution debacle...

The inside was astoundingly gorgeous...but also packed with tourists and hot.  

We were so glad we had been able to spend most of the day outdoors.

We left Versailles and raced back to Paris to do something kind of crazy...visit the Louvre.  You probably don't know many people who have done Versailles and the Louvre in the same day.  There is a reason for that...suffice it to say, the Louvre is closed on Tuesday so we couldn't go the day before and wanted to at least catch the high points before we left.

The Louvre was insanely crowded...especially surrounding the Mona Lisa.  We checked her off the "must-see" list first and moved on to explore other areas.

The ceilings were my favorite part--works of art just waiting to be discovered above your head.

We saw Venus de Milo, Hammurabi's code and a statue of Ramses.

We left feeling tired, but accomplished.  Fortunately, we had a late dinner reservation at Le Grande Colbert, a restaurant made famous by the movie Something's Gotta Give with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton.

It was a special evening full of tasty food with a quintessential French atmosphere--the perfect last supper for our fabulous week in Paris.

Thank you for reading along and reliving our experience in Paris.  I still have some fun tips, thoughts and videos to share...so check back this week for more Parisian posts!