The French do many things well but organising a major tourist attraction competently is not one of them The Palace of Versailles being a case in point Mid-November; off season presumably but the place is jam packed with as half a many people as they would expect in July or September. If the British invented the queue the French Took it to a fine art. Queuing for tickets: twenty minutes. Queuing to get into the main Palace: 40 minutes. Queuing for the one easily located loo :don't ask but you can't do all those things and have timer for anything else in normal visitinghours. Incidently from my O and M observations the female WCs have a faster throughput than the Gents. You stand in the same queue and separate at the appropriate moment making sure in my case that I am following a male Japanese rather than a female one. Why the difference in speed of passage I don't know -perhaps Japanese gents are more prolonged at their toilet than the distaff side.

The gardens are free-you need a ticket for everything else. With Ms KB in tow we could not manage the queue for the main palace so contented ourselves with the Dauphin's one. The best bit in here was Marie Antoinette's Bed (or two) (We think but don't know as we could not be bothered to go around with the walkman and ear phones.)

Katy had a good time and took a flight of 110 steps from the Orangerie to the Grand Terrace. I hope the Japanese and Chinese (95% of the visitors at least-came in over 50 buses) had a good time as well. Many of them were more concerned to photograph each other than actually look at anything!  ¶ 1:51 PM