Tours, France
I had never heard of Tours before and had little idea what to expect. Our hotel was neat and I even got a double bed to starfish on. We'd booked to do a Chateaux tour the following morning so for that evening, we simply went for a walk along Rue Colbert which was the medieval street that lead to the old town. We found a little restaurant and had another 3 course meal we may have lived to regret had it not been so tasty. We ambled home slowly and had a relatively early night in preparation for an early start the next day.
I have to admit, the next morning, although not as 'crack of sparrows' early as we would have you believe, we did in fact go to McDonald's for breakfast. It turns out there's only so many baguettes and pastries you can cope with for breakfast and the macca's is surprisingly tasty in France. We might have picked up a brioche for the road however...
We went on an all day tour of the Chateaux, I thought there might have been wine involved, I was wrong. I might have got excited also by the fact we were going to Chambord and that HAD to have something to do with the liqueur by the same name, about which I was also wrong. However, I am not wrong about the fact that I love castles and this was a day of French Castles, much to my delight. Our first stop was Azay Let Rideau which was a rather impressive sight surrounded for the most part by a moat and with enough to explore indoors without draining your brain.
The second stop was Villandry, famous for it's gardens. We opted to only visit the gardens instead of the castle too as we didn't have quite enough time to see both. Villandry is one of the few remaining example of renaissance kitchen gardens with a whole lot of anal retentiveness about them, we're talking beautiful symmetry here people! We were actually standing in front of a Pear tree(bush?) as it dropped a fruit, which one of the girls promptly jumped over the rope to pluck from the ground and eat the contraband. I hear it was good.
We went looking for the maze and came across the herb garden, a lake with swans and even a tennis court on our way to the sun garden. We managed to miss the maze but we didn't mind. What we didn't miss and were very glad of, was the decorative gardens which are closest to the Chateau. They are huge and amazing geometric garden beds displaying different patterns and colours, and of course each pattern had a meaning but I don't remember which was which, just that they were damn impressive and would be a pain in the arse to maintain. I'm not surprised they have 10 permanent gardeners on staff!
We grabbed some lunch to each en route to the next Chateau, Chambord. It's one of the biggest and most decadent of all the Chateaux as I think it was a royal residence for a while. Chambord looks like a Disney castle on steroids, possibly at Christmas time. It has a few floors and passages off each to other rooms and in general was palace you could easily miss something in, so we went methodically around each floor before going up to the next. The really cool thing about Chambord was it's staircases, two of them, wrapped in a double helix format. S owe went exploring checked out the chapel, climbed to the roof for a few photos and eventually had to drag ourselves away or risk missing the shuttle to the next and final Chateau.
So, we came to the last castle, Chinonceau which is the most famous - I clearly haven't been paying attention because I only know Chambord because of alcohol... Anyway, the final Chateau had been built over a river, I kid you not. The majority of it had been torn down and rebuilt, but there is still an original medieval tower as you approach the bridge in to the Chateau, but sadly we couldn't go in. We had a great time exploring this one as it was a square shape with a room at each corner, so easy to navigate, and a very silly, long gallery that stretched out across the river and houses all the treasured artworks and so forth. And it had a rockin kitchen that to get to, you had to climb up a stair way over one of arches that straddled the water, oh the novelty!
But finally the day had come to an end and we headed back to the hotel. That night we went for an explore through the old town and found a nice restaurant, also with a 3 course meal deal to stuff ourselves full with... You would think we'd learn but the creme caramel was so good we couldn't regret it ;)
The next day our bus wasn't coming till very late in the day so we braved the somewhat torrential rain and went for a walk to see the old town in daylight, albeit through sheets of rain. We stopped at a creperie for brunch, it seemed both French and appropriate. Eventually we made it to the Basilisque of St Martin where we ducked in to escape the rain and had a bit of a snoop around including down in to the crypt under the pulpit where the tomb of St Martin was. I had thought I was all church/cathedraled out but it turned out I could still cope with them :)
After a bit more walking around in the rain, we grew tired of that game and headed back to the hotel to wait for the bus and enjoy both a dry, warm place and free wifi. Once the bus arrived, it was time to part ways with Janelle which was a shame because she was good value, but, I might see her for one night in Paris... Maybe. Then it was the long, but not as horribly long as I expected, leg in to Paris. We arrived reasonably close to time and I was pleased to find the hostel was better than expected and I promptly headed to bed.