Château de Fontainebleau

The American girl in me has always held a fascination with castles and royalty.  I've always loved the pomp and ceremony of royal weddings, the tabloid pictures showing princesses in tiaras and elegant ball gowns.  Perhaps we unconsciously put the idea in our head from the time we are little girls dancing around in tulle and tiaras on our tippy toes!  How many of us have held the secret dream of finding out that you are a princess forced at your birth to enter a commoners life undetected to protect your royal identity from those who wanted to oust you from your royal responsibilities until the day was right for you to spring from the masquerade and return to save the monarchy?  Just ask yourself....How many times have you seen Princess Diaries 1 and 2?  How many times have you heard and related the fairytale of Cinderella or any of your favorite Disney Princess?  Ok!!  So my point....I have seen the castle Fontainebleau in books and behind Château Versailles, it was one of the Palaces that was on my "Must Sees" in France.  (By the way, I did not know this until this week that château is the word for castle in French, so Castle Versaille and Château Versailles are the same thing.)


I decided that Tuesday would be the best day for the 3 1/2 hour one way journey to Fontainebleau because Mike was out of town for a couple of days and our Wednesday was busy with repairmen for the apartment.  I checked the website for information on the castle, checked the weather, invited an American who is visiting a family in our ward for a few weeks to come with us, and on Tuesday morning we hit the road excited for our adventure.  When we arrived in Fontainebleau's city center, I patted my back as I saw the castle for the first time and noticed that we had picked a perfect day to come since the crowds were small because school was still in session in France for several more weeks.  As we approached the ticket counter I realized that I was not as smart as I had just prided myself.  The Château is closed on Tuesday's!!!  When I had read the website I had misunderstood thinking that they meant they were closed on Tuesday December 25, January 1st and some other day....I thought those days were Tuesdays and not that they were closed EVERY Tuesday!!  We all got a pretty big laugh about that as we decided to make the best of a bad situation and just take our sandwich au beurre de jambon et fromage and wander around the grounds before we started our 3 1/2 hour journey back to Lyon.  Here are a few pictures of us "making lemonade out of lemons!" 

We took our sandwiches and found a bench in the garden and ate our lunch laughing about our great adventure!

Am I a lucky mom or what?!

Notice that there is no way you could get a picture like this UNLESS you went on a Tuesday!!

The one stray tourist in the background...the grounds are not as elaborate with sculptured flower gardens and fountains like Versailles but are nonetheless very beautiful.  The Château was used as the main home for many French monarchs but it was used by most as a hunting ground.  The surrounding forest is still known today for its variety of animals and hiking areas.

We went to take a closer look at the one of the ponds and almost immediately the huge fish in the pond swam over to scrounge for bread crumbs from the American tourists.  These fish don't realize that we leave no bread crumb behind when devouring our sandwich au beurre de jambon et fromage.  As we walked along the edge of the pond we had up to 10 fish that were following behind begging for crumbs.  Sorry....we don't have any food!  Don't worry little fishy....tomorrow there will be some compliant tourist with a spare baguette.

Yep, they are definitely closed!  Justin had to take a peek just to see what we were missing.  Apparently we were missing some pretty good stuff!!  We will have to go back.  I think we are free next Tuesday...oh wait, I did that already!

As we were leaving the grounds, we couldn't help but noticed 3 or 4 members of the line drummers from the Gardes Francaises following us down the promenade toward the castle gate.  When we looked back again, there were 7 or 8.   Then another glance and there were 10 or 11 joining the march.  Justin turned to me and made a backward comment to the growing infantry ...."We don't have any food!" (see two photo above for comment about the starving fish!)  We laughed hysterically.  Justin is so funny!

Ok, so they weren't following us but instead posing for a future brochure!  I think they looked hungry!  

Other things you can't do on days when the palace is loaded with tourist....Body surf down the balusters of the Palace Grand Staircase!