Blogs from Amboise, Centre, France, Europe

Issy seems to have come down with a cold, which sucks for her. She decides to rest up so I set off on my own to see what I can discover. We’ve been told that there are more than 300 chateaus in the Loire Valley, so I think we might struggle to get around to all of them in the four more days that we’ve got here. It seems that for something to be called a chateau it needs to satisfy a few specific criteria, and your average Frenchman can’t just decide one day to hang a "chateau" sign out the front of his house and start charging passers-by exorbitant fees to look around it. Chateaus are generally palaces or large manor houses, and they can’t be in cities. If you want to show off your ... read more

Today we travel to France’s Loire Valley. We wait in long lines of traffic as we try to get to Amsterdam airport to catch our train. Our taxi driver tells us that this is due to “the incident” yesterday. We’ve given up watching the news, so we don’t know what he’s referring to. He makes it sound very sinister, and our minds immediately jump to terrorist attack. Fortunately it’s nothing quite so dramatic. It seems instead that someone at the airport petrol station inadvertently pushed the wrong button, which meant that 50 flights couldn’t take off because they didn’t have any fuel. The chaos that we see here this morning is apparently the flow on from this. Our train to Paris leaves twenty minutes late. It then crawls across Belgium, but as soon as we cross ... read more

Matkalle lähtiessä minulla ei ollut oikein ymmärrystä siitä, mihin olemme menossa. Olin kyllä katsonut kartasta, mutta paikan nimet eivät sanoneet minulle mitään. Tiesin, mihin minun piti matkustaa Pariisista junalla. Rolandilla oli tavoitteena, että käymme kiertämässä 8 linnaa neljän päivän aikana. Sittemmin kävi ilmi, että seutu on kuuluisaa Loire-joen laaksoa, jossa Ranskan kuninkaat ovat rakennelleet linnoja erityisesti renessanssin aikaan. Minä luulin, että Ranskan kuninkaat viihtyivät Pariisissa, mutta se oli kai myöhemmin. Ei kovin paljon myöhemmin, koska vallankumouksen jälkeen täällä ei enää oikein kuningasta ollut. Léna oli etukäteen iloinnut siitä, että näemme Leonardo da Vincin linnan, joten suunnistimme ensimmäisenä Amboiseen. Clos Lucé on pieni linna tai iso kartano, johon Ranskan kuningas Frans I kutsui ystävänsä Leonardon viettämään vanhuuden päiviä. Leonardo ehti e... read more

Geo: 47.4104, 0.981122 We left St. Malo and stopped at Fougeres to see the St. Leonard church and the public gardens. We walked the ramparts and took photos of one of the largest medieval castles in France. We drove to Chinon in the Loire valley to visit some chateaus. All we have been seeing so far in the countryside is corn, no grapes. They grow a lot of corn here. We asked a local where all of the corn went and he said it was feed for the animals. We drove over to Langeais Chateau. It is a fortress like chateau with 16th century furnished rooms. After that we drove to our B&B for the night. A very nice B&B in a French house. The owner spoke pretty good English, so we had some good conservations. ... read more

There had been a little improvement in the weather overnight and the overcast sky was broken with a large patch of blue sky away in the direction we intended to head for the days sightseeing. It was still a bit cool when we opened the windows to let some fresh air in before breakfast and too nippy to sit in the sunroom. As we have been experiencing for the last couple of weeks the sun is noticeably later in rising which gives you the feel that the day is passing by .OK, we get a longer sunset on the other end but having the sun early is a better way to get going for the day. We packed the chilly bag with cheese, tomatoes and ham as well as drink for lunch and by mid morning ... read more