Our Visit to the Palace of the King of Kings

Not long ago, our daughter Emi called with a surprising question for me. “Mom, why haven’t we ever gone on a “girls trip?”

I hadn’t ever thought about a “girls trip” because I never went on one. You see, I was the only girl in our family of three children and we usually did everything we did as far as trips go as a family. Even if my mom and I had gone on a “girls trip” we didn’t call our outings by that name. Emi too is the only girl in a family of six children and she had been watching and hearing about her friends who went on a “girls trip” with their mother and sisters almost every single year.

So as I contemplated her question I simply said, “I really haven’t ever thought about that. The idea has never even occurred to me, Emi.” But why don’t we go?

We found some incredibly inexpensive round trip tickets to Paris, France. And that was the clincher. If we were going to have our first ever “girls trip” then it was going to be an incredible one. You know, a “go big or go home” sort of thing!

Well, I needn’t tell you this but it was pure heaven to be in Paris with my daughter and my two granddaughters. We walked miles. We ate way too many baguettes. And we became connoisseurs of crepes on the street. We rode the Paris Wheel, climbed the Eiffel Tower, rode bikes along the Seine, saw impressionist art, sat in front of Monet’s Water Lilies panels in the Orangerie. And we stayed up way too late. I truly had the time of my life. It seemed magical and filled me with joy. There we were in the City of Light and we enjoyed every second of our time together.

On the last day in Paris, we decided to rent a car and journey to the Paris temple in Le Chesney just outside Paris and near the Palace of Versailles. We arrived early in the morning, we took photographs in the gardens, by the marble Christus statue, and visited the Visitor’s Center and we even had a tour of the temple.

It was glorious and magnificent. The temple echoed Monet’s Water Lily paintings in the stained glass windows. And as light streamed through those beautiful windows, we could truly feel heaven shining down upon us as we reverently walked through this magnificent temple.

When the tour came to an end we were reluctant to leave because of sweet spirit that enveloped of us and all the light that filled our souls that day.

As we walked out of the temple doors, we walked down the street and entered the beautiful grounds of the Palace of Versailles. We walked to the lake, got an ice cream cone, and shared our feelings about the temple as we sat soaking up the sun and watching the swans swimming serenely past us.

It seemed symbolic that most of our walk that morning before our temple experience was on the Rue de Babylonne (or Babylon St.). To us it represented the reality of living in these latter-days— it is often necessary to be in the world while on our quest to reach the temple doors. We shared feelings and what we had observed while in the temple—the majestic stained glass dome above the curved marble stairway, the lilies in the stained glass windows that seemed to blossom as one ascended to the upper floor in the temple, and the beautiful baptistery where baptisms are performed for our own ancestors, beginning to the process of sealing families together in one long chain for all eternity. Indeed, as a mother and grandmother, this first ever “girl’s trip’ was everything I had hoped and much, much more.

As we finished our ice cream cones, I offered to wait in line to purchase tickets for us to tour the historic and opulent Palace of Versailles before returning to Paris. As I stood to go, my granddaughters stopped me. They said, “Nana, we really don’t need to visit the Palace of Versailles. We have been in the palace of the KING OF KINGS!”

And indeed they were right. Anything else pales in comparison. And if you ask my daughter and granddaughters what the highlight of our “girls trip” was, I bet you will already know their answer!

I shall ever hold in my heart the memory of our first ever “girls trip” to the City of Light, and being filled with His light as we entered His Holy House.

Join Elaine at our International events this August and many other events this fall during the TOFW ARISE tour in 2017.