Versailles Tour

Margaret taking a tour will not help you avoid the crush that will be inside the palace , you will in fact just be part of the problem.. those tours block passages and push folks around, yuck.
Skipping the line is good though but you can do that with a Paris Museum Pass or buy just prepurchasing admission before you go.. BUT , even with those and with a tour you still have to make it through security , ugh.. get there before 9 .. Versailles runs its own little private tours also, and apparently you can skip the line with them, but you will still eventually have to face the massive hordes inside most of the palace ( the tour takes you do some sections the masses are not in) but you don't want to miss the "Hall of Mirrors" or otherwise known as "Hall of sea of back of heads and elbows in your back" ..lol

@pat, "Skipping the line is good though but you can do that with a Paris Museum Pass" The Paris Museum Pass doesn't always guarantee a quick entrance. I was at Versailles a few weeks ago, and even with a Pass I still stood in a queue for over an hour to get into the Chateau. I know I was in the correct queue, as I asked. Once I got the front of the line, the guard took one look at the Pass and waved me right through. However, getting to the front of the line was the issue! The gardens were much less crowded, but I had to pay extra for that as they're not included with the Museum Pass (€7.10 as I recall). My strategy was to visit the gardens first and then hopefully the crowd at the Chateau would be smaller once the tour groups had left. Unfortunately that didn't work as it was on a Tuesday. When the Louvre is closed, everyone apparently comes to Versailles! When I rounded the corner from the station and saw the mass of tour buses in the Versailles car park, I knew it wasn't going to be a "pleasant touring day", and that proved to be the case at the Chateau. I definitely agree with you that the tour group hordes tend to clog the inside of the Chateau, and their umbrella-toting guides can be quite "pushy". On a positive note, I found Rick's audio tour of Versailles worked really well, and provided an interesting history lesson as I got to each room. Cheers!

Ken, I know that security is a separate line, I have been many many times, I thought I stated that .. the Museum Pass does allow you to skip the long TICKET line, but as I said, not the security line, which is why I said, get there by 9. Arrriving even at 10-10-30 puts you in a wait, as the tour buses pour in by 10. And the Museum Pass DOES cover the Gardens.... EXCEPT on fountain show days,where there is an extra fee , but only for the FORMAL gardens directly behind the chateau, in the summer that is Saturday and Sunday. One can however still access the Hamlet and Trianons and rest of the grounds without paying the extra , you simply walk around the garden walls and enter via the public entrance to the ground near head of the Canal. The ticket to enter the formal gardens on Fountain show days is an extra 8.5 euros. I frankly didn't think it was worth it to each his own. I suggest going on a non fountain show day .

@pat, Regarding your many visits to Versailles, I couldn't find any reference to that in your previous reply in this Thread, so I'm not sure where you "stated it". I was aware of the difference between the ticket queue and the security queue for Pass and ticket holders. In hindsight the situation may have been different if I had arrived at Versailles before 10:00. Then again, it may have been the same since it was Tuesday. I had no choice in which day to visit Versailles, since I was only in Paris a few days and had already used the first day of my two-day Pass at the Louvre and other locations. Rather than "hijack" Margaret's Thread, I won't add any more comments. Cheers!

No ken,I did not mean I had stated my visits in previous posts,but that the line for security and ticket holders were separate.