The Great Outdoors

And finally, the last day!  We had to check out of our hotel fairly early to make it to the train station where we put our luggage into lockers.  We had a little bit of problems with ours because it required exact change and spit it all back out when we didn't put it in fast enough but we got out eventually.  Dr M, his wife, and Nick's wife all came up to me and were making sure I was doing okay.  I hate worrying people but it's nice to know they care about me.  Maybe I should mention to them that I'm not buying a plane ticket home after all?  Anyways, to help keep me entertained I took a few pictures.

 And then a saxophone and an accordion player came in.  The sax player wasn't that great but I took a picture anyway.

 And then we got to Versailles!  While we were walking there I was telling Matt's Stacie about how it is common in the group to link arms while walking places now.  One of his daughters decided to link arms with me and then the youngest one did the other side.  Because I was linked up to them, I ended up going around with the Masons for a while.  That's okay though--we all know they're the cool people.  :)  Besides, it felt good to have the youngest one wanting to hold my hand more than her mom's and to have the older girls so eager to spend time with me.  My own siblings don't do that anymore.

After a while I accidentally ended up leaving them.  I found a group pretty quickly but they weren't exactly eager to have me with them so I left them after a while and then found one I could stay with for the rest of the day.  I was a little panicked because I didn't know how to get back so I said a quick prayer to Heavenly Father asking Him to help me find people I was more comfortable with.  Pretty soon this group came along.  I'm so grateful that He cares about me enough to answer silly little prayers like that!

Naturally, I took a lot of pictures of the ceilings.  Because that's what I do.

 Most of the statues were covered up so it was kind of disappointing but still pretty.

 The best part was when we all rented bikes and went for a ride around the lake at to Marie Antoinette's palace.  I haven't really ridden a bike since I lived in Alaska so I struggled for a while trying to remember how it worked.  I ran into a few trees but before long I was sailing smoothly.

We had to hurry back to return them for the cheaper rate but it was super fun.  We were pretty tired at this point so we headed back to Paris.  We went and got falafels--amazing--before heading back to the train station.  I had some traumatic experiences going through security so afterwards I went and got ice cream.  Naturally I felt better after that.

Then on the way back I sat next to Nick's son again and talked the whole time again.  At one point I had Matt's oldest daughter come and sit on my lap and she joined the conversation for the rest of the ride.  Finally around eleven o'clock we were back home in London!