The Loire Valley

This weekend there was an AIFS trip to The Loire Valley, which is the Château region of the country. There's probably at least a dozen of them scattered along the river. Not all of them are right on the river, but most are very close. It's quite an area. All of the castles are only a few minutes drive away from each other, so we got to visit 4 and see a few others.

We left early on Saturday and the first château we visited was le Château de Blois. There was a lot of history there, but the tour started getting boring just hearing about which Kings decided to build which parts. Although that was the interesting part about the place. The Château was built in several periods by several kings. They'd knock down one of the parts and build their own in a different style. The whole place is a mash-up of different parts and it looks pretty messy. There was one huge open spiral staircase though, which was one of the best parts about it. It was nice, though, because the area was on the Loire River and the view was nice over the city.





There we also first started seeing the emblems of the kings. The emblems are all over all of the châteaux. The porcupine, for Louis XII. The salamander for François I. The hermine (ermine or stoat) for their wives, Anne of Brittany and Claude de France.



Second we visited Château de Chambord. This was the biggest of the châteaux that we visited and the most extravagant. The place was just huge and the roof was incredibly complex. It basically looks like the skyline of a city. The castle also had a double spiral staircase. There were two sets of stairs that never crossed each other going up the center tower. We got to walk around on the roof which was awesome.






To finish the day of touring we stopped at a Vouvray wine cellar for a tour and a wine tasting. It was pretty short, but it was my first wine tasting.


Today we left the hotel in the morning and visited Château d'Azay-le-Rideau. On the way to the castle we ran across a cat who jumped out of a bush. He was very friendly and let me pet him. It was originally a privately owned castle, but was left and became a place where visiting royalty would stay in France. It might have been my favorite. It felt a lot more like a house than the others, and also had a moat haha. It rained a bit while we were there but we had pretty good luck. On the way back to the bus we looked for the cat again, but instead we found a very friendly dog instead.







For lunch we stopped in Amboise. There is a château there, but it was mostly destroyed so we didn't actually visit. We found a really good sandwicherie and had sandwiches and dessert, which was also really good. There was also a very nice view of the river, although it was flooding because of all the rain.



The last visit for the trip was Château de Chenonceau. This was also really cool. The original part was the main castle and a tower built on the River Cher. There was then a bridge added to cross the river, then a two story gallery was built on top of the bridge. There were gardens surrounding the castle, unfortunately the rain made the visit a bit miserable. We still walked through one of them and I'm glad we did, although we got kinda soaked.




The weekend was definitely worth the trip. Next weekend starts my spring break, so I probably won't post for almost two weeks while I'm traveling. But when I'm back there should be a bunch of good stories about the trip to tell.