Blogs from Centre, France, Europe - page 4

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

This posting will cover four days as we have taken some chillaxing time as we picked a rural property to stay at with a pool. 16th. The trip from Beaunes was great for me as finally I have got Rose into the driver seat. We started out from Beaunes to Châteauneuf-en-Auxois, but we had to stop when we found a lock in the middle of nowhere. Châteauneuf-en-Auxois is one of those fantastic little towns with so much to see, the website unfortunately didn't indicate that they shut for lunch so we missed a tour of the Chateau, but we found a new house to buy (see Photos). Once back on the A road we stopped at a rest stop for Rose to take the reins. We spent the next two hours on C and D roads ... read more

Our next stop after Oleron was Loches a royal city with an impressive donjon and one of those stories about a King and his lover. It is one of those stories that repeats itself over time in different places. A man , royal or not seems to fall in love with someone he shouldn't have. A woman of less than royal birth and one that is deemed unworthy of him, She might be his mistress. Destined never to marry him but she is there in the background. It happens in most countries histories at some time and we come across it time and time again. Think Ines de Castro born in 1325 in Galicia, Portugal. She is best known as lover and posthumously-recognized wife of King Peter I of Portugal . The dramatic circumstances of her ... read more

This afternoon, Sophie drove us to visit the royal château at Amboise, a massive pile of stone perched above the charming little town of Amboise, which lies 17 miles east of Tours, on the south bank of the Loire river. As has been the weather pattern lately, the day began under overcast skies, but by late afternoon we enjoyed sunshine, blue skies and temperatures in the low-to-mid-70s. Unlike the other châteaux we've visited so far, the Château d'Amboise served as a royal residence for much of its existence. Since Neolithic times, the Châteliers promontory, the 120-ft.-tall hill upon which the château rests, has been an ideal observation post, while offering an exceptional natural defense. There is evidence to suggest that Roman legions under Julius Caesar (100 BC-44 BC) occupied this fortified site. As the residence for ... read more