Not Chambored

I found my camera cable, hurrah. And thus can bring you many photos from our trip to the Loire Valley a couple of weeks ago. It was, of course, our annual pilgrimage to Vitiloire. I won't bore you with all the details of Vitiloire - there was a lot of wine, a lot of food, and a lot of giggles. We went to the cheese restaurant and the guinguette, and I got raspberry financiers from my favourite bakery. We caught up with my sister, my friends, and my sister's friends, and a good time was had by all. We drank too much, stayed out too late, and still dragged ourselves up the next day for the train back to London/more Vitiloire, as the case may be.

I didn't visit any castles with Jules last year - he originally hadn't planned on coming along at all - but this year I thought it would be a bit silly for him to go all the way to the Loire Valley again and not see a single château. So, because it was kind of on the way from Brussels, and more importantly, because I'd never been, we decided to go to Chambord.

I've probably been to most of the major Loire châteaux now and several of the minor ones - Chenonceau, Villandry, Ussé, Azay, Blois, Chinon, Langeais, Loches, etc., but Chambord had long been on the list without quite managing to get there. It's the biggest and one of the most iconic of the châteaux, but not that easy to get to. There was a direct bus in summer, but I never wanted to go in summer,with all the tourists. Otherwise it was some sort of fiddly train/bus/faff which, as I recall, only allowed you to see the château in about an hour or you were stuck there for three or four hours. Picky, I know, but you can afford to be when you live somewhere and think you'll be able to go see it any time you want.

So anyway, it was a good opportunity to go while we had a car, and once Jules stopped sulking that I wouldn't go to Chenonceau with him (kidding), I'm sure he thought so too.

Chenonceau is undeniably gorgeous, but Chambord had a real fairytale frisson to it. It's not that it looks like a Disney castle, but walking towards it, seeing the towers first come into view, it does seem like something magical out of a storybook. You feel like Peer Gynt should be playing or something. We were lucky enough to have the only really nice weather of the weekend while we were there as well. Everything's that little bit more special with bright blue skies instead of grey on grey.

Behold.... Chambord!

At the back (front?) entrance

It took a long time to get one with the flag fluttering

The courtyard and the famous double-helix staircase, which doesn't look like much, but is fun to go up. Most scholars agree the staircase was designed by Leonardo da Vinci, then living nearby at Amboise.

Old-fashioned mirror selfie in the King's bedroom

I'm not sure whether I should find these taxidermied animals cute, but I kinda do.

Windows in the chapel

Built for François I, his symbols of the ornate letter F and the salamander were everywhere. In the legends of the time, salamanders were meant to be able both to extinguish fire and to spit fire, and throughout the château you see them doing both. This gave rise to François' motto, "I nourish and I extinguish", which sounds like a threat, but supposedly refers to being nourished by the "good fire" of faith and love while extinguishing the "bad fire" of passion and injustice. 

The château is huge - 440 rooms, although not all presumably open - and most of the interior is fairly unremarkable, at least if you've been to your fair share of castles. I loved this space on the second floor though, with an ornate ceiling studded with François' emblems.

This panorama is cool but gives a false sense of the layout - the rooms aren't in a row like they look here

Where Louis XIV liked to sleep

The other great highlight of our visit was getting up on to the roof terraces, which offered lovely views over the surrounding countryside and a close-up look at the fabulous towers. Supposedly, François I wanted the roofline to look like the skyline of Constantinople.

View of the church from the roof

I take too many photos, I know. So hard to choose the best ones. Let's round it off with a little Vitifun.

Villandry visit

As they say, you don't know what you've got till it's (almost) gone. Or, more accurately, you don't bother to get off your arse to see it until your time is running out. I have so much to do between now and mid-September that I won't have many opportunities to tick any last "must-see" sights off my Loire Valley checklist, but one thing I managed this Saturday was to finally get to the château of Villandry, just 20 minutes away from Tours and renowned for its lovely gardens.

I'm not especially in love with gardens, but the rumours are true, they are beautiful. Although much of the gardens tend towards the formal, geometric layouts, there are also sections of more "natural" (although no doubt carefully planned and tended) sections to enjoy. The château itself is not exceptional, but the entry ticket to the château and gardens is not much more expensive than the gardens alone, and probably worth it for no other reason than you get to climb up into the tower and get a c. 300° view of the gardens. The weather forecast said partly cloudy, which actually just meant scatterings of fluffy white clouds, all the better for pretty photographs, and temperatures which were nice and warm without being oppressive.

And, since it was so close and I was up and out bright and early, I was back in time for lunch, with plenty of time to clean my flat, make my famous potato salad, and head to Liz's new flat for a barbecue dinner!

I'd love to get to Chambord as well before I leave, but I'm not sure I'll have time to. But in any case, I'm sure Tours hasn't seen the last of me! The countdown to leaving is a good reminder to look about myself and appreciate where I am. I try not to forget that there are plenty of people who dream their whole lives of seeing the châteaux of the Loire Valley, and I've been very fortunate to live in such a lovely part of the world and visit many of them (although I sometimes have a sneaking suspicion that there are people out there who came for a week and managed to see more!)

Anyway, I'll leave you with a few of my photos... (PS which, looking back at them, are strangely empty of people. Some of the formal gardens are not open for walking about in, for the rest I suppose just luck. I definitely wasn't all alone there, although I suppose the size of the grounds and the fact that I was in and out before lunchtime cut down on the crowds!)

Can almost pretend I took a break in the lavender fields of Provence

The "cross"garden

The love gardens, representing the stages of love from passion, romance, flirting (?) to jealousy

Love hearts

A beautiful ceiling salvaged from a Spanish palace - there are three others like it scattered around the world

The kitchen gardens

Great success!

May is a busy old month for me - this weekend (and week, with the bonus two public holidays in the middle) is a quiet pause, but otherwise, with the society wedding of the season and a visit from my sister coming up, things are pretty hectic. The same went for last weekend, when I finally hosted my Kiwi friend Amber in Tours. She had meant to come around a year and a half ago, but the trip was cancelled at the last minute when she realised she'd lost her passport, and never rescheduled.

So this time, I wanted to make sure the trip lived up to its long-awaited hype. And, if I do say so myself (using the most current pop-culture reference in my bag of tricks), it was a Great Success! I tried to achieve a balance of the different experiences the Loire Valley has to offer: from châteaux to good food to (obviously) wine, and mix in some of the more off-beat experiences you might not have on your list as the average tourist. And we were lucky enough to have perfect weather, despite forecasts to the contrary, and some interesting unexpected encounters thrown in.

After a girly wine and nibbles evening at La Cave à Manger on Friday night, we were up relatively bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for a short (c. 30 minute) road trip to Azay le Rideau, where we enjoyed a delicious lunch in a sunny courtyard and checked out the château. Azay was mainly chosen because Philippa and I had yet to go there, but it is also to be recommended for its beautiful setting on a small island on a lake, and its small but pretty style. It probably only took around an hour and a half to see, with the interior not being particularly outstanding, but I think that was plenty to be satisfied but not bored traipsing around for hours. Just taking photos of the beautiful exterior was probably the highlight.

I was brave and had the "goats cheese and raspberry crème brûlée" for my starter at lunch. It was nice, although it could have passed for a dessert, to be honest

Me and Amber at lunch in Azay-le-Rideau

A strange optical phenomenon in the sky - around the sun was a dark circle lined with a perfectly round rainbow. I did some research afterwards and found that this is a 22° halo, caused by the refraction of light in tiny ice crystals in the clouds. It was pretty impressive seeing it in this setting, and imagining what people in the Renaissance period might have made of such a sight. In fact, a related phenomenon, "sun dogs", is believed to explain the appearance of "three suns" in the sky before a key battle in the Wars of the Roses.

A pretty café in the château grounds which was presumably once a gatehouse or something

Me in front of the château

The château and its lake

Me and Amber at the château

View from the castle windows

On Saturday night, I rounded up the ladies to check out one of the premier events in Tours' glittering social calendar - the Foire de Tours (tradeshow)/Fête Fouraine (carnival). According to one of the vendors I spoke to on saturday night, this is the biggest event of its kind in France outside Paris (whether it's true, I don't know). By day, you can check out a variety of stalls selling everything from plumbing to furniture (exciting stuff), but you can also take in carnival rides to your heart's content or - and this is where it gets interesting - sample the delights of the massive "gourmet village" i.e. eat and drink as much as humanly possible. And so we did, in a bustling (and crowded - my floor-length dress was, in hindsight, not smart) fairground atmosphere.

By some miracle, Amber, Liz, Philippa, Mel and I were all up and at 'em again on Sunday (after about 5 hours' sleep) and ready for the last of my planned activities, a wine-tasting trip to the nearby small town of Vouvray, an area particularly known for its sparkling wines. (Did you know the Loire Valley is France's second-biggest producer of sparkling wines, after Champagne? And at a fraction of the price too.) I'd carefully researched half a dozen wineries that were open for tastings on a Sunday, and plotted out the route between them on Google Maps. First stop was the splendidly named Domaine d'Orléans-Bourillon, which Liz had seen on Facebook was having an open house that weekend. This turned out to be a fortuitous discovery, an experience a little bit more special than some other wine tastings I've been to in the region, where you were invited to spit your wine into the gutter of a barn (not that I think I'm too good to spit in a drain, of course). From the original glimpse of the cave (French for wine cellar, but also often literally a cave, as in this case), which was decorated with candles and an illuminated picture of Marilyn Monroe, this was a special visit.

The cave's tasting area

Amber and I enjoy a VIP tasting of 30€ moelleux wine

Basically, the people who turned up for the open day were the owner's mates, and us. So it didn't take long before we were basically being treated like the owner's mates too. This included being treated to free Thai food, quickly moving to addressing everyone as "tu" like old friends, and basically being just given whole free glasses of wine, rather than the tiny tasting sips you often get at these events. We even got escorted into a special posh tasting room and treated to a 30€ bottle of moelleux wine as a special VIP treat. I didn't really get too much out of the wine side of things, since I don't drink a lot of white wine and particularly detest sweet wine (I slipped my glass of the expensive moelleux to Liz when the owner wasn't looking), but the whole experience was a lot of fun!

It was one of the more bizarre encounters we've had, and I hope (and imagine) that it was a different experience than Amber would probably have had if she was just your typical tourist. It's not every day you end up spending an entire afternoon (because yes, we failed to move on to any other wineries as planned) basically hanging out with a vintner and his mates. There wasn't a lot of dégustation in the sense of really focusing on and discussing the wine, but the fun atmosphere more than made up for that I think! And maybe it provided a contrast to the often snobby and stand-offish reputation the French (or should that be Parisians who work in the tourist industry) have amongst tourists. We left with bisous all round, bottles of wine in tow (he managed to sell two of the 30€ numbers, and even I got a white wine for guests). So I think I can declare it a successful weekend in Touraine!