Paris - Day 4: Bike Tour of Versailles

Petit Hameau on the grounds of Versailles, because everyone needs a fully staffed fake Austrian lake and village on their property. No, seriously, this is gorgeous!

UPDATED: 2/4/2023

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After long days of walking around Paris, our feet were sore and some blisters were starting to rear their ugly heads. So, we planned our fourth day perfectly: a bike tour of Versailles to give our feet a rest and use some other muscles for the day!

We had read great reviews online of the Fat Tire Bikes tour of Versailles (Versailles Full-Day Bike Tour with Picnic) and figured that would be a fun and interesting way to experience the site and be able to traverse far more of the grounds than we would be able to do on foot. Because tickets can sell out and we wanted our pick of days and times, we bought our tickets online the week or so before our trip. We then nervously watched the weather report as it looked more and more like we would end up with a rainy day.

Our AMAZING guide Rory from Fat Tire Tours. Thanks for a great tour, Rory! (Side note, he did not know we were bloggers until the end of the tour.)

We had an early reveille to get breakfast, cash from an ATM (we needed this for the Versailles market), and to catch an Uber to meet up with the Fat Tire Bike guides over near the Eiffel Tower at the Javel–André Citroën metro stop. The day was gray and weather reports had been calling for rain, so we were a tad nervous it would be a messy day to bike. Luckily for us, most of the cool, misty rain cleared out of the area around the time we really got started with our bike tour, though we did get caught in a torrential downpour at the end of the day after we had finished biking. I count that in the win column!

We caught the RER train out to the Versailles station with the Fat Tire Bike tour guide and about 19 others in our tour group. RER stands for Réseau Express Régional, predominantly a suburb to city center commuter train that has stops at Disneyland Paris and CDG airport. It is tied in to the regular Paris metro system, and you can find more about metro transportation in Paris here.

I found the Paris RER to be very similar to other commuter trains, for example Virginia’s VRE train system with the double-decker cars. The seats were covered with one of those horrendously loud patterns, and I will never understand why patterns like those exist or why an actual person ever thinks their selection is a good idea.

After about 20-25 minutes, we reached the Versailles stop (called Gare de Versailles / Château Rive Gauche) and headed with our group of 25 to the facility a few blocks away where Fat Tire Bike Tours stores their bikes. After getting ourselves situated and drying off the seats from the rain, we rode a short distance through the town’s streets to the Versailles market. If you love outdoor farmers markets, this one is worth a stop! Officially called Place du Marche Notre-Dame, it was large enough to make wandering through it interesting without being too overwhelming. There were vendors with all types of fruit and vegetables, butchers with meat, cheeses (ah, the delicious, horrible smells!), nuts, and attached indoor markets with other foods and wine. The point of our stop at the market - other than of course to enjoy exploring it - was to pick up food for picnic lunches.

Our tour guide knew the market well and offered very helpful advice on which vendors would be helpful, ideas for what we may want to gather for our picnic smorgasbord, and the 45 minutes we were allocated was just the right amount of time. We collected cheese, fruit, slices of meat, and of course, a baguette. All of these items safely stowed in our backpacks, we were back on our bikes to enter the ground of Versailles. To get a sense of the lay-out of the palace and its grounds, you can view a map here.

We entered through a side entrance and biked through a tree-lined lane, Avenue de Trianon. Our guide shared information along the way so that we could better appreciate what we were experiencing. The trees lining the alleyway were originally hand selected by the king as he traveled, requiring a whole group of people to dig up the selected mature tree, cart it to Versailles, and plant it. It’s no wonder with kings like that the people of France eventually mutinied!

After the peaceful view of trees, we made a left-hand turn and found ourselves on the back side of Versailles near the Grand Canal, a cross-shaped body of water. We continued to weave along a path that followed the Grand Canal until we stopped for lunch near the far end of the canal for our picnic lunch in the grass. From there, we had a view of Versailles across the water of the canal. Up until this point, we had ridden about 4.5 miles on the bikes on a predominantly flat grade, which made for easy riding.

Lindsey at Versailles | Fat Tire Tours | To Make Much of Time

We rode past The Grand Trianon and on to Petit Trianon. Petit Trianon was built by Louis XV, in 1768, to be the residence of his long-term mistress, Madame de Pompadour (after whom the pompadour hairstyle is named). She died four years before its completion, and so the residence was initially home to Louis XV’s next mistress, Madame du Barry. Where Petit Trianon became truly of interest to most people and what makes it most famous today was when Marie Antoinette took up residence after Louis XV’s death and her husband, Louis XVI, gifted it to her. While Marie Antoinette lived at the palace and was not allowed to stay overnight at Petit Trianon, it was often her escape during the day.

Petit Trianon Arched Walkway | Versailles | To Make Much of TIme

For all that Marie Antoinette is maligned, when she first married future King Louis XVI, she was only 14 years old (he was 15), and she was sent in from her homeland of Austria. France and everything French was incredibly foreign to her and she was ill-prepared for such a life. Petit Trianon and its surrounding gardens that she helped to develop served the purpose of her establishing a place that felt comfortable to her. With an overly romanticized (and easily - and fairly! - criticized) view of bucolic life, particularly the one she had left back home in Austria, she had an entire faux village built, staffed, and stocked.

Petite Hameau | Versailles | Fake Austrian Village | To Make Much of Time

Called Petit Hameau, Marie Antoinette and her friends used the village as essentially a dress-up, make-believe setting for their idealized country life. The village looks like it comes straight out of a fairy tale! Most sources claim that the queen and her friends would dress as shepherdesses, pretend to run the farm through milking the cows and other animal management, however the official Versailles website claims that this is purely myth. Since we do not know the definitive answer we will let you decide for yourself who to believe. If this were true, I can only imagine what the farm workers at the site felt seeing someone play at their lives, which were a much harder existence. Today, the site has been renovated and has live farm animals to add to the ambiance.

If you visit Versailles, I highly recommend a visit to Petit Hameau, Petit Trianon, and the surrounding gardens. It is a much less populated part of the grounds and probably a more realistic sense of what the royals themselves experienced when at Versailles.

From there, the bike route took us around with a few uphill portions, alongside a park area with a body of water (Pièce d'eau des Suisses) and back to the shop to drop off our bikes. In total, we biked approximately 10.5 miles over the course of the day. I think you probably need to be in decent shape and certainly comfortable on a bike, but it was not particularly strenuous.

With a few extra minutes to spare before our allocated time slot to enter Versailles, our guide recommended we check out the Cathédrale Saint-Louis de Versailles , right across the street. The cathedral was a beautiful building whose construction began under the reign of Louis XV.

Ready to check out the palace, we walked about 15 minutes over to the golden gated entrance of Versailles. Because our tour was a ‘skip the line’ tour, we were able to go directly in with our tour guide. Seeing the long line out front made me feel very fortunate we did not have to stand in queue! At this juncture, our tour officially ended so that we could explore Versailles at our own pace and prioritize what each person wanted to see.

Versailles Golden Roof | To Make Much of Time

At this point in the day, we had a few hours to explore Versailles before its closure, and our plan was to tour portions of the interior and then the more formal garden. The inside of the palace was utterly packed with people to the extent that it inhibited our ability to really enjoy it. We wandered through the Hall of Mirrors and the various apartments, following along informational panels with the history of the rooms and people who had resided within them. You can view an interactive map of the palace here.

Around the time we were ready to escape the crowds and tour the garden, black clouds moved in, the wind picked up, and we decided to high-tail it to the metro station instead since there wasn’t enough time in the day for the weather to clear again before Versailles closed. Just before we made it to the metro, the skies opened up with strong winds and pouring rain, so we were glad we had left when we did.

Given our own personal interests and the way we enjoy traveling, I think we ended up seeing less of the palace (and certainly less of the formal garden next to it) but more of the far-flung portions of the estate, and that was perfect for us. Though, I do wish the weather had permitted us time in the garden. If your goal is to fully immerse yourself in the palace and see all of its rooms, the bike tour may not be the right option for you as you could literally spend an entire day touring the house and nearby gardens.

By the time we made it home, we were cold and a little damp, and exhausted. After warming up and drying off, we ventured out around 8pm for dinner on Île Saint-Louis (it truly was the day of Louis!) and ate at a cute place that was very American-friendly called St. Regis Cafe. We kept with our Paris wine-of-choice of Bordeaux. For meals the group ordered everything from a burger topped with an egg to duck to eggs benedict to salmon with crème fraîche and topped the meal off with creme brulees to go around.

A restaurant next to the place we stayed.

After a day of resting our feet by pedaling, the next day would again result in us hoofing around Paris to check out a variety of more off-the-beaten-path sites.

Is it just me, or does our route resemble a person? Perhaps Gumby?

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