Loire Valley Castle Tour

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The weekend after Budapest I decided to take it easy and stay around Rouen, however my friend Celeste and I quickly realized that there really isn’t much to do and since we had a four-day weekend (Monday and Tuesday classes were cancelled) we decided we should go somewhere for at least a few days. One of our friends told us that you could get last minute deals to various destinations around France on the SNCF (French railway) website. We researched this a bit and found that one of the featured towns was Tours. Tours is located in the Loire Valley, which is a very quaint area of France known for its castles. In fact, we later learned that there are 54 castles located throughout the Loire Valley. Incredible! Upon researching Tours on a French tourism website, we also learned that the French spoken in that region is the purest form of French. After we arrived in Tours, I did recognize the slightest difference in their accents in comparison to Parisians and Normans that made the French language seem even more beautiful.
Tours was a really cute town just to walk around and explore. There was a cathedral (of course- it’s France) and a small castle within the town as well as dozens of shops, cafes and restaurants. My favorite part was the waterfront because it had a beautiful footbridge that stretched across the river that had a spectacular view of the town. Tours was the epitome of how I originally pictured France- charming, slow-paced, beautiful, people carrying baguettes everywhere and drinking wine in the park. It really felt like it was out of a movie.
The next day Celeste and I decided to take a castle tour of the Loire Valley. There were a number of different tours to choose from but we decided to take a half-day tour so we wouldn’t get back to Paris too late. The tour left from the train station in a van that we shared with four people from China and two people from Russia. Our driver was incredibly nice. I thought he was just going to drop us off at the castles and pick us up, but he gave us information about the castles on the way. He said he had been doing this for twenty years and I could tell he really enjoyed his job and had so much pride in being from this country and particularly that region.
The first “chateau” we visited was called “Chenonceau.” Chenonceau was a royal palace built over a river, surrounded by many gardens, so the grounds were just incredible. On the way to the castle our driver told us that it was also called the “Chateau des femmes” because there were a number of women who influenced the design and control of the castle, including Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers- Henri II’s mistress. We had about an hour to explore Chenonceau before meeting back at the van to go to the second castle, called Amboise.
While Chenonceau was set far back into the woods surrounded completely by nature, the Amboise castle was actually in the center of a town appropriately named Amboise. Although it was different, I absolutely loved the castle and the town. We had to enter the castle by going up a number of stairs that eventually lead to the top of a hill. The castle was really impressive but since we were short on time, we decided not to go inside and to just walk around the grounds. Since we were at the top of a hill we had a great view of the town. There were so many gardens there as well and it also overlooked a river. One of the statues in the gardens was of Leonardo de Vinci because he lived in the town of Amboise at one point in a country house called “Clos-Luce”. It was also an absolutely perfect day to be outside, and had we more time I would have loved to stop at one of the cafes in the town and just soak up the simplicity and beauty of the town, but unfortunately we had to head back to catch our train back to Paris. I’m really glad I was able to see that area of France, because going on a castle tour is really something that is so unique to France, so I’m glad I was able to experience it while I am living here.

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