Adventures in Strasbourg and the Loire Valley! Part Deux

Wednesday morning Grace and I boarded our third train back to Paris from Strasbourg, en route to Tours across the country. This trip posed some challenges: once in Paris, we had 50 minutes between the arrival of our train and the departure of the next train to get from Paris Est to the Montparnasse train station, via the Paris metro. Scary, scary, scary. We succeeded though, and then had an hour-long train ride to Saint Pierre des Corps where we took another five-minute metro-like train to Tours.

View from our terrace

Tours is an interesting city, but I actually found myself liking it a lot. It’s mostly known because it’s the city of the Loire Valley so you can go there to stay while touring the countryside and the chateaux. Being a little less touristy itself, Grace and I had decided that we weren’t going to spend an extra day there and leave Friday afternoon after our all-day tour Thursday. But we found our hotel (mostly by accident – a lot of construction was messing up our original mapped walking plans), which wasn’t open until 5, so we sat at a café for a little over an hour drinking yet again café au lait. We then checked in, and the hotel was completely adorable. The proprietor was very nice to us and upgraded our original room to one with a terrace. There was also Internet AND a TV in our room, which was amazing because we hadn’t watched TV since we left until Wednesday night. We decided to get pizza for dinner and had a delicious one at La Scala: tomatoes, artichoke hearts, candied tomatoes, and vegetable chips with mozzarella. SO GOOD.

Anyways, we woke up early Thursday to catch another continental breakfast before walking to the tourist office to begin our tour. Our tour guide was a really nice man originally from Sri Lanka who can speak French, Portuguese, Italian, and English. He drove us around in a Fiat mini van, along with a Chinese girl named Jamie who studies in Lille, and an English teacher from Wisconsin named Devan and her mother, Melanie.

The Loire Valley is famous for all of the chateaux that are found there. Here's the Wikipedia link that describes what a chateau is and what it is compared to a palace or a castle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chateau  (I figured it would be easier to just include the link as opposed to explaining it, then including the link!) 

The drive leading to Chenonceau

At Chenonceau, but just so gorgeous

Our first chateau was Chenonceau, which sits over the River Cher, and is gorgeous. A tree-lined drive leads you to the chateau, and there are gardens and fields that surround the building itself and the water. There’s an interesting history behind Chenonceau, it was the house of the mistress of Henry II, Diane of Poitiers. After the kind died, his wife, Catherine de Medici, kicked Diane out and took over the chateau herself and adding her own garden to rival Diane’s. The weather was sunny and cool when we got there, but of course, it being February, the gardens weren’t very pretty so it’s hard to judge whose garden is superior. We were able to explore the entire chateau and the chapel and the grand hallway were my favorite parts. The chapel is very tiny (compared to all the huge cathedrals we typically see in France) and so when light goes through the stained glass it colors the walls and floors. The grand hallway is the part of the chateau that goes over the river and so had a lot of amazing views and was very open and pleasant. There were lit fireplaces in the hallway too, which was nice as it is February and the stone building didn’t offer much in the way of insulation. Lit fireplaces became a thing of our day in the Loire Valley, three of the four chateaux had the fires going! We got to see the kitchens that are very famous for being the best of the chateaux, and, again, these offered really cool views of the river.

View of Chenonceau from the side

Chenonceau

The Chapel

Casual fire in the fireplace

The grand hallway

The Cher from a window in the hallway

Part of the kitchen

View of the river from the kitchens

The Cher!

One of the gardens

We then decided to take ten minutes to go wine tasting, as the Loire Valley is the third largest wine producing region in France, which was the best idea ever. These wines were delicious. Never fear, we had about two sips of four types of wine, so it was definitely for the tasting experience. From the Touraine region, we tried a red, a rosé (my favorite), a white, and a dessert white one (my other favorite), and it was a very pleasant experience.

Wine fields in the Loire Valley

Amboise from the chateau's grounds!

Amboise was our next destination, a town that sits on the Loire and can boast of its famous chateau and of its being the home to Leonardo da Vinci’s grave. The town itself was very pretty, very traditional with tiny roads and stone buildings. To get to the cathedral, however, you have to climb this huge hill from where the entire town can be seen. We spent a lot of time around the walls of the chateau just looking at the city and the Loire. I was a little scared, but also pretty fascinated by it all. A chapel sits very precariously on the hill and over the city, and this is where Leonardo da Vinci’s remains are kept. He and François I were besties, and so François had him move to Amboise to live for the last three years of his life. After we explored the castle we went to see his house and were able to take a few photos of it! It was a good ten-minute walk each way but it was definitely worth it.

The chapel was as pretty as the one at Chenonceau, and it was really amazing to be standing however many feet away from Leonardo da Vinci, never mind the view the chapel has of the city.

The Chapel

Gorgeous light from the stained glass windows

The Chateau d’Amboise also sat precariously on the hill; only it faced the Loire instead of the village. It was actually really scary, the hill was very steep, but definitely had its benefits as a safe place for the royalty to reside. We were able to explore this chateau entirely again, and we were able to see the throne, some suits of armor, a few rooms in the style of the 19^th century, and we climbed the one main tower over the river.

Chateau d'Ambroise

View of the Loire from the chateau

The throne!

So high up!

Eeeeek!

Leonardo da Vinci's house

Just a casual chateau casually chilling on the Loire (Chaumont)

Chambord was our third chateau, and inarguably the most awe-inspiring. This chateau was originally built as a hunting lodge for François I, who loved to hunt. As this is his second mention out of three chateaux, it’s important to note that he was a huge influence in the building of the chateaux of the Loire Valley. This is, according to our tour guide, due to his involvement in the French Renaissance, during which architecture and art became very important for monarchs. The Loire Valley was also the capital of France at the time, and so that is where the nobility and royalty resided. However, I digress. Chambord is famous because, in addition to its grandeur and beauty, it took about 30 years to complete and can say that Leonardo da Vinci had helped in its creation. Inside of the main building is a staircase known as a double-helix staircase, which is very famous. The French loved their spiral staircases, and this one has two spiral staircases in one, but the steps never cross. Chambord is also surrounded by hunting grounds with a diameter of 32 kilometers (about 20 miles) and the hunting grounds are the same size as Paris.

Chambord

The double-helix staircase

There were again a lot of lit fireplaces in the chateau, which was truly a blessing as the day had gotten very cold and windy and everywhere inside the building it was absolutely freezing. We explored yet again, even though half of the 400 rooms aren’t open to the public. However, it was very intricate and gorgeous with huge decorative rooms with famous paintings and lush furniture. The views from the roof of Chambord were amazing too, and the roof itself was a beautiful masterpiece of stone and turrets and just overall incredibleness.

View from Chambord

Our final chateau of the day was Cheverny, which was my least favorite overall. Another hunting lodge, it actually is still inhabited and owned by the family who has owned it for hundreds of years. We weren’t able to go to the third floor of the house, but were able to see the first two floors, and I think it’s because the third floor is still in use for the family. The decorations and furniture of this chateau were very over the top; there were a lot of gold, dark rich colors, armor and elaborate dressers and drawers and furniture. It was definitely interesting but I didn’t really like most of the interior. I did, however, love the outside and the look of the chateau, and there was one bedroom in particular that I thought was very beautiful.

Cheverny

My favorite room in Cheverny

We then returned to Tours, arriving back in our hotel around 8:00 at night. Grace and I watched TV and crashed, woke up to have our breakfast and then left the hotel at 11:00 in the morning. Our train wasn’t until 3:20, so we walked a little bit around the Old Town part of Tours and saw the outside of the cathedral before going to the train station and sitting in the café for most of the afternoon. We had a two hour train ride back to Paris, then a horrifically crowded metro ride from Gare d’Austerlitz to Paris Nord, and then a warm train ride back to Arras.