Fontainebleau

In an effort to knock things off the "todo" list, today we went to Fontainebleau which is southeast of Paris.

Tickets

You buy tickets at Gare de Lyon from the blue or green "Ile-de-France" machines (Ile-de-France in French meaning the Paris metro area, though literally means "Island of France". That's how important Paris is to France). The Yellow machines won't sell tickets for the train there. Surprisingly it was actually covered by my normal 5 zone Navigo card, and made me wish I had paid for a 1-5 zone tariff for my brother instead of the normal 1-2 zone one since with the trips to here and Versailles, it actually would have saved money. For those who don't have a Navigo card, the Paris Mobilis 5 zone pass is the one to buy for 16.10€. It gives you unlimited travel for a day to the 5 zones of Paris (including Fontainebleau) and covers the bus from the Fontainebleau train station to the castle as well (otherwise 2€ each way). The one slight catch is that the Mobilis pass doesn't include the airport (even though it is in zone 5) but you're going to a castle, not the airport, so it shouldn't be a big deal. If you decide to buy individual tickets, just go through the screens and select the "Fontainebleau-Avon" station and will be around 10€.

The train to Fontainebleau leaves from Gare de Lyon about every 30 minutes. The Paris By Train website helped explain the whole process pretty well. The key part was that "Fontainebleau" will never be listed on the departures board to figure out which track the train will be leaving from, instead you have to look for one of the following (the terminus stations):

• Laroche-Migennes
• Montargis
• Montereau
• Sens

On the platform there may be a monitor with a scrolling list of stops, and that should list  Fontainebleau-Avon on there somewhere. Once you get to the station (usually the 3rd stop, about 40 minutes later) follow the crowds to catch bus #1

The Fontainebleau castle itself is amazing! It has the best interior I've seen yet (including the Vienna and other French castles) and has a lot of history starting with its construction in the 1500's. The exterior is a bit more of a hodge-podge of different styles than most castles which is its only drawback, but it's still very very impressive. There's also a Napoleon museum inside which is really neat. We all loved it.

So the question becomes, if you can do only one, do you see Versailles or Fontainebleau? Versailles is more famous and historically important, and the exterior is better, but since the interior was stripped during the revolution, Fontainebleau is much better inside. In the end, I'd actually tip my hand towards Fontainebleau. It's easy to get to from Paris, incredibly pretty inside, and still quite beautiful outside with a very large garden area. It's also located in a cute French village and is WAAAY less crowded than Versailles. You can't go wrong with either though, and both are definitely worth doing if you have the time. 

Afterwards we barely made it to catch a Bateaux-Mouches (Flying Boat) boat tour on the Siene. It was pretty neat, but I wouldn't put it on the "must-do" list since you'd end up seeing most of the sights anyways on foot which is more impressive. Some of the views from the boat were neat though, and if you hate walking it's not a bad way to see a lot of stuff. Hopefully it's warmer than when we went though, we nearly froze to death. The interior of the boat is heated, but who wants to sit inside when there's Paris to see!