And yet more chateaux!

Thursday 25th May: Rochecorbon to Chartres

As we have been living in a cave (literally!) for the last couple of days and the WiFi was a bit erratic, I will summarise our adventures since leaving the forests of Mont pres Chambord.

In total we have seen 8 Chateaux of every sort in the last three and a half days. And despite them all being very distinctive they are beginning to turn into a blur in my memory!

Tuesday 23rd May - Ewan's birthday.

After leaving the forests we headed for Villesavin nearby. It was very different to the grandeur of those we had previously seen. Very modest, mostly unrestored and needing  attention but with some quirky exhibitions. A lovely girl who was in charge of parking, tickets and tours, showed us around as we were the only visitors. Only two rooms had been restored completely, but the family who owns it lives in one of the wings.

It was actually lovely to see a chateaux without the glitz and gloss of the larger ones - I thought it was very charming and we enjoyed wandering around discovering its eccentricities.




It had a number of quirky exhibitions I guess to try and entice people to visit so they can make enough to keep the place going. They included  some lovely old horse drawn carriages, one of which was like a bus, with the original basketry sides.

It seated 8 people and needed 6 horses to pull it.A selection of old prams and a number of wedding dresses and paraphernalia was fascinating too.

A lot of work went into these!

By far the weirdest collection was hundreds of glass wedding ornaments, the making of which is now out of fashion. Basically they were enclosed floral arrangements that included the wax orange blossom worn by the bride. The arrangements were made by the bride's mother. Not sure what you did with them: I guess they just sat on your mantelpiece?!

The other curiousity was an original circular dovecote that housed hundreds of birds.

Note th \e ladder to get to the top of the nesting boxes

Next it was the Chateau Royal de Amboise, another one of King Francois 1 initiatives. It was grandly sitting on top of a large hill overlooking the slate roofs of the town of Amboise  and the Loire River. It had been altered over the centuries but had some beautiful furnished rooms and gardens.

The tiny chapel housed the remains of Leonardo Da Vinci who lived down the road for the last three years of his life. Francois 1st considered Leonardo to be a genius so lured him to France to assist wiht some of his chateaux designs and eventually gave him a modest chateau of his own as reward for the fascinating discussions they had, He also gave him a stipend of 700 gold coins per year, which allowed Leonardo to live well for the last three years of his life.

Le Clos Luce was only a few hundred metres from the Royal Chateau so we couldn't miss that! It was a pretty chateau with very liveable light and airy spaces. A studio and library were set up as they might have been when he was there.

A wooden tank for defence purposes

And some of his inventions, drawings etc were displayed. A quick wander through he gardens and we were all done with chateaux for the day!

A double decker bridge he designed

The 'lantern'tower you can see is all that
remains of a 16th Century castle that was built
 on the very top of the cliff.

We headed for our new abode for the next couple of days: an apartment in a cave in a tiny town perched above the Loire called Rochecorbon. The cliffs that contain many cave dwellings rise from the banks of the Loire steeply, so for centuries the caves have been used for various industries that suit the cooler temperatures - eg. silkworms - and for housing.

For future reference: Airbnb - La Gite de la Loire - Suite de Ciel - host is Julie.

Our terrace was the green & the yellow roof
that you can see directly above the roof of the pink house

The AirBnb cave we stayed in was owned by a new Zealander Julie and her French husband. As you can see it was very modern inside - the only part of the apartment that wasn't actually in the white-painted cave was our terrace overlooking the river.Julie delivered delicious breakfasts to us each morning and we sat on the terrace admiring the view. It stays at a temperature of about 13 degrees in the cave, and is very damp so we had two dehumidifiers going to dry out the humidity a bit. Of course there were plenty of stairs to get to the top, but the adventure was so much better than going to stay in Tours nearby.

The walls of the cave have been painted white and are irregular and curved

Julie had given us a bottle of champagne to celebrate Ewan's birthday and pointed us in the right direction for a suitable restaurant - L'Émbarcadere. Ewan was hoping to find lamb shanks as they are his favourite and they do cook them beautifully here. Despite Google Translate and the waitress's basic English we could not work out what the lamb dish on the menu would be....and voila! When it arrived it was a tender lamb shank: Ewan was pleased. I, on the other hand, had spotted a dessert that I fancied called 'L'enorme profiterole' which I assumed would be a slightly larger than usual profiterole See the photo for the actual size! Even I failed to get through it!

After a complimentary dessert wine, thanks to Ewan's birthday, we managed to clamber back up the stairs to reach the peace and quiet of our cool apartment, and bury ourselves in the thick doona for a good night's sleep.

your replete and well-rested correspondent

Dianne