Summary
Leisurely morning of breakfast and exercise followed by the drive to the beautiful château of Chenonceau. Loved Diane de Poitiers’ garden (in my preferred color scheme) with white roses, foxglove and snow-in-summer and purple pansies and foxglove. The interior was nice restored with amazing furnishings and fabulous fresh flower arrangements in every room. My favorite parts were the kitchens which are housed in the arched parts over the Cher river and the Gallery above them. It has a fascinating history, serving as a hospital in WWI and as the border between free and occupied France in WWII. Back to town to hit a laundromat!
Details
We wake late. Looking outside we see the rain we were promised. There had been a 100% chance. It is supposed to rain off and on til maybe 8 pm. Well, we have had more than our share of beautiful days, and this is how everything is so green and flowery. We wonder if we’d be as happy with our month so far had it been cold and rainy the whole time. Perish the thought.
We head down to breakfast and get our coffee and food. There’s just one other couple there eating when we arrive. And there are two hotel workers who have little to do, so they just stand around scrutinizing us intently.
The food choices are a bit less voluminous than our previous two stops. Then again the cost has been going down as we’ve been traveling west. 25€ each down to 17€ each and now 15€. We like the trend.
Today’s the day we visit our first castle here in the Loire Valley, Chenonceau (in the city of Chenonceaux, hm). It’s a half-hour drive mostly through pretty countryside. Between Amboise, Clos Lucé (Leonardo’s house here), and all the castles, er, chateaux, there’s a lot to draw tourists. They in turn bring money (and leave a good portion of it). As such, the area is fairly well off. It’s well maintained. In the springtime nature helps out with pretty new growth.
We park, get our ticket’s two QR codes scanned and we’re in. There are brochures in maybe a dozen languages on offer. Our tickets are for a specific time and they warn that the walk from the parking to the castle proper takes like 15 minutes. We’re not worried about any particular “be there” time, so we stroll. The walk in is down a very long unpaved ‘road’ with huge plane trees on either side. I can imagine the king returning from an arduous trip thinking how good it is to be home and how good that hot bath is going to feel.
We see the chateau, which we’ve been to multiple times. It’s looking well. There is no scaffolding, which is nice. We detour to visit the pretty gardens to the left and the right as you come in. There will be tons of annual flowers planted soon, but for now the perennials are going crazy. We see a building that looks like it’s being viciously attacked by an ancient wisteria vine. Alas it’s not it’s time to bloom yet. Karen spots a flowering plant out of place and contemplates reporting it to the proper authorities.
Actually going into the castle is still in our future, so we pop into the cafe for an OK overpriced lunch and a beer. Next we visit more gardens (they have a lot of them) including for food and medicinal purposes. We see Catherine de Medici’s apothecary. There are scores of big labeled pottery vessels which we later learn were there so that Catherine could look her best. She was pretty (certainly she thought so) and she was ready to spend whatever it cost to stay that way.
In the chateau I mistakenly thought we needed to show our tickets (dummy, we did that to get in to the property). We wait and see other people showing their tickets and getting interactive audio headsets and handsets. We listen to the man explain in detail how to start, stop, restart, etc. them. When it’s our turn we show our tickets. “No, you didn’t pay for these, NEXT!” Whoops. Mybad.
It’s crowded as we walk the rooms of the chateau. I’m amazed how well maintained it is. I postulate that Catherine de Medici must have been a fastidious housekeeper for it to look as well as it does now. Later on the tour we’ll hear of the generations of people who invested oodles of money and untold time to bring it back to the state we see it in now.
I reconsider whether we have it better now or back then. If you were a Medici and had essentially unlimited wealth, it wasn’t bad.
Did I mention it is crowded? As we go from room to room and floor to floor it gets more so. Many of the spaces are round trips. You exit the way you came in. There are people trying to get in and we’re having trouble getting out (to make room for the new people). And this is in May, think of how pack jammed it’s going to be in June and July! Some of the other people we’re there with are little people (school children), many of whom are more intent on poking each other than to seeing the chateau.
The kitchen, as always, is a highpoint of our visit. They have a huge fireplace where they rotisseried the wild boar or venison. They have a clock mechanism with weight, outside so it can fall a further distance, and a flywheel so it doesn’t turn too quickly. Ah high tech!
Before we head back to our car we take a walk in the woods. There are paths going off in straight lines from a point in very geometric layouts. We’re sure that we’re walking where kings and queens of yore rode their horses. We go for at least 20 minutes, until the path stops and turn around. We don’t want to get lost.
Back in our room we gather our sizable pile of dirty clothes and start our walk to the laundromat. There’s already one couple in there, Americans, doing their laundry. This is not our first rodeo so we’re fairly quick to load our clothes, buy the soap, select our cycle and start the wash. It’s after that point that I see that the machine, helpfully, adds the right amount of laundry detergent automatically. Whoops! We screwed up doing laundry again? I think it’s in my DNA to do so. Argh! As the clothes go into their final, long and powerful spin soap bubbles accumulate on the glass. We contemplate going for another rinse cycle but decide against it.
As we await our clothes another couple comes in. They’re neither American nor French, it would seem, but come from far away where another language altogether is spoken. They do speak some French, but don’t read it very well, and so we help them get going with the machines.
Happy that we have clean (albeit perhaps still soapy) clothes we head out for dinner, pointing ourselves towards likely looking places we’d seen previously. A few are closed today, bummer. One is open but is full up for the night. We make a reservation for tomorrow. A couple are open but the menu sounds bizarre. Thank you, no.
We end up in a nice, traditionally French bistro/restaurant and order wine and food. We split a starter and a nice steak (medium) and everything’s delightful. Feeling no pain from the wine I order Le Colonel for dessert: lime sorbet with vodka, and then more vodka. We were pleased with all of our choices and take a long walk post dinner to work of a calorie or two of dinner. Again we look at our watch and at the sky… it’s well past nine and it’s broad daylight. We could get used to that.
Photos
[They’re in the correct order]
