Day 89. Leanne & Kyle joint blog.

We wake on Friday morning super refreshed.  Frederic offers a breakfast spread suitable for the Royal Family as well as a small army ... including fresh bread, a huge jar of clan-favorite Nutella and perfectly picked cantaloupe. 

Our plan is to jump right into French history with a visit to the Palace of Versailles built by Louis the 14th in 1638.  Versailles is billed as one of the (if not the) most beautiful and impressive Palaces in Europe, if not the entire world. Suffice to say, the bar is set pretty high.

A walk through the beautifully decorated and well-appointed rooms gives one the immediate feeling of the grandeur (aka the place was absolutely over-the-top ornate and ginormous) of the French and its long fascinating history.  Versailles is a good hour from Paris by car, it would have been a bit longer in the days of the horse carriage.  In choosing Versailles for his new abode, Louis the 14th wanted  to distance himself and his court from Parisian politics and possibly negative rumblings.  We take our family photo in the famous Hall of Mirrors. It takes us the morning and half the afternoon to walk the palace.  10K steps is in our rearview mirror as we round the turn and head for 15K steps.  

King Louis the 14threigned for 72 years which is the longest recorded reign of any monarch in Europe.  He outlived all his kids who waited their whole life but never got to be king.  As we take in all the paintings, we notice a pattern emerging.  The majority of paintings are of…none other than the King himself.  Not surprising, you get to be the King, you get to have pictures of you painted. What was funny was that in paintings of other people, the other people are holding smaller portraits of King Louis. Yes, even when the picture was of someone else, he found a way to photo-bomb it back in the 1600’s.

The palace was built on his father’s massive hunting grounds of fun childhood memories.  With no access to rivers and a king desirous of many fountains, the palace was quite the architectural marvel in its time built on former swampland and forests.  The Palace grounds are as ginormous as the Palace itself.  Seems to stretch to the horizon in every direction – this place might not even fit in Los Angeles.

The clan enjoyed the awe-inspiring interiors but once outside in the expansive perfectly manicured French garden the heat started to take its toll.  Justin suggests to me to rent a golf cart — strategically choosing to approach mom first on this request as he knows a golf cart is probably just my speed for high adventure. We rent two carts for an hour and cover the massive, well planned, symmetrical gardens while simultaneously hitting the required fun quotient for the day. The golf carts are computer program to shut down if you stray too far off the “in-bounds” cart path.  The problem is that are no signs indicating what is out of bounds so we are left to interpreting a French map while driving the cart. Suffice it to say that we ended up out of bounds more than once and actually had to push / carry the golf cart back over the inbounds line before it would start again.  We are all for security technology, but after pushing a heavier-than-it-looks golf cart 25 feet, we can’t help but wonder if it’s really necessary.   If we tried to steal the golf cart and there was no security technology, the cart would run out of its electric charge long before we made it off the massively expansive Palace grounds.  It would be like trying to drive a golf cart from Los Angeles to Mexico on a single charge.

With the day done, we are all very tired.  We would normally have taken the RER line back to Frederic’s no problem.  However, today the RER works are on a one day strike so the RER is not operating.  A French person told us later in the trip, “that’s what the French do if they don’t like something, they go on strike.”  As a result, there is complete traffic gridlock on all the streets surrounding the Versailles exit.  We took an Uber here in the morning no problem – 10 min wait, 25 min drive.  So we are more than a little dismayed when the Uber shows the closest driver is 25 mins away.  Faced with no other alternative, we click the button and sit down to wait it out. 

[Kyle’s recounting of the Uber ride]

My Uber is arriving first so I take 3 of the kids and head out to curb.  I check the license plate, identify the Uber and wave to flag him down. He sees me and pulls over to the curb when my phone dings and pops up a message that your Uber driver cancelled and I am being re-routed to another driver.  Confused I open the door and say, “I’m Kyle, your Uber ride.”  He says, “you cancelled?”  I respond “no, you cancelled, see?” as I hold up the Uber app. I now see that the closest Uber driver they have rerouted me too is 35 mins away.  “I still take you if you want,” he says.  “How much?” I ask.  “40 Euros,” he responds. “But the Uber fare you originally agreed to was only 20 Euros.” He looks at the traffic jam, looks back right at me, smiles and says “you want the ride or not?” 

The reality dawns on me that the Uber drive has pulled a clever scheme on me.  He accepted the ride, sees us, purposely cancels the Uber ride and then doubles the non-Uber price knowing I have no other alternative than to wait an insanely long time for another Uber driver who might end up being his buddy and pulling the same trick on me.  I feel pretty much the same way as if he had pulled a gun on me and demanded my wallet. Given how tired we all are, I have no choice but to unhappily agree to the 40 euro ride.

But there’s more.  The ensuing ride demonstrates one of the key value propositions of Uber over a taxi – accountability.  Since this is no longer an Uber ride, so I can no longer give him a bad review (I check Uber and since he cancelled the ride, now of his info shows up in my history).  We pull off and he cranks up the music which is very loud and contains an array of English curse words that I’d rather the kids not be exposed to for the rest of the ride.  After a few minutes, I politely ask if you could change music and turn it down.  He keeps the same music but turns it down from volume 10 to volume 9.  I sigh and look out the window as I decide it’s better to avoid a conflict as the Uber driver clearly has no moral compass.  After a while, he must be bored with the music as he turns it off.  Thank God, I think to myself. But so sooner has he turned it off than he whips out a list and starts calling people on the car’s Bluetooth speaker system.  He has no earpiece so the conversation is blaring at top volume throughout all the speakers in the car.  He is speaking in a language that I can’t identify that is not French and not English. But the time the taxi pulls up to Frederic’s, I have a blaring headache.

I am running short on euro’s and see he has a mobile credit card machine, so I use my credit card.  The driver had pulled over on side in a way that was blocking Frederic’s neighbor who is trying to get out when I give him my credit card.  The neighbor starts honking and waving his hands. The credit card machine spits out the receipt which I quickly sign before the neighbor decides to ram the taxi out of the way.  As the taxi is pulling away, I look down and see that the driver charged me 50 euros when it was supposed to 40.  I guess he felt like the exceptional customer service he provided warranted a 10 euro tip whether I agreed with it or not.

When I started the trip, I thought pick-pocketing would be the most common risk we would have to guard against.  Three months in, taxi drivers are the biggest scammers we need to guard against.  In Budapest, we pre-arranged a vehicle from the airport for 7,000 Hungarian Forint and our Airbnb owner told us that taxis will try to charge clueless tourists as much as 100,000 Forint for the airport ride. 

Back at the chateau, Frederic offered to take our clan to a special welcome meal with his family. He booked the finest restaurant around and we are immediately spoiled with a killer 180 view of Paris in a former royal residence. As we are eating dinner, a blood-red moon rises up right next to and over the Eiffel tower – what an amazing picture to behold.  In fact, Louis the 14th was born just 20 steps from where I enjoyed the best tuna tartar known to man. What such a special treat for us. 

Two of Frederic’s kids who came to stay with us in Los Angeles came to dinner and it was great to catch up with them and reminisce about their experiences in the US.  We toast our family friendships (we have had five different teen exchanges over the years!), to happiness and good health. We feel so blessed for this friendship because Frederic is one of the nicest people we have ever met in our lives. To visit him is a pleasure and a great privilege. 

So a huge THANK YOU shout out to Frederic for the dinner!