loire valley day two

If I ever run a hotel I’m going to include breakfast with the price of the room because free breakfasts rock! Who knew breakfast could be so amazing at a holiday inn?! I’m telling you, everything in france is better. I had baguette with butter and bonne maman raspberry jam from the cutest little jars. I really wanted to steal one but there was this scary old waiter guy who watched over everything you did and I didn’t feel like being yelled at so early in the morning. I also had mini chocolate croissants, a hard boiled egg and some salami but nothing truly says good morning like a great tartine (what the french call baguette with butter and/or jam.)

After breakfast we all got back on the bus and headed to leonardo da vinci’s french home.

 I didn’t even know that he had lived in france but then again I pretty much don’t know anything about history which makes me the tour guide's best friend, because I'm the only one that actually listens.  Anyway, we went through da vinci’s house pretty quickly because it was relatively small compared to the castle we saw the day before. We saw the room da vinci died in as well as the underground pathway from his house to the nearby castle. Da vinci was good friends with one of the french kings, so the king wanted da vinci to have a private way to reach his castle which was one mile away.

Da vinci’s house had different quotes of his in every room. Near the little chapel in his house I found my favorite quote, as well as the only quote I fully understood since they were all in french. The quote was “l’amour triomphe de tout”, in english, love conquers all. Who knew da vinci was such a romantic!

The walk through his house ended in the basement where they had descriptions and little models of all the brillant ideas da vinci had. I had started to take pictures of every idea and model in order to show my dad later, but then I realized da vinci had more ideas that I even had the patience to take pictures of. Don’t worry, I still took pictures of the cool ones.

Once we were done inside, we realized it was pose time at da vinci's house. I wonder what his thoughts would be about our parisian pose. 

After the walk through his house, the group decided it was time for a photo shoot in the garden, and by the group I mean our photo director dorene. The garden was apparently full of models of da vinci’s inventions that you could play with but we didn’t have enough time to discover them all because we were off to chateau de chenonceau. 

When I told my dad that I was going to the loire valley he hope that I would see this castle and I did! It was beautiful. At first when we got there and were walking down the forest like path I kept thinking, where is this water everyone talked about? I had heard that this castle was partly famous for being built on top of water but I wasn’t seeing any water!

It wasn’t until we actually got near the castle, at a diagonal view, that I saw the water and fell in love. 

This castle is not only built on top of a river but it is surrounded by two beautiful gardens.

We didn’t have a tour guide for this trip but luckily somehow gabriel became a personal tour guide for our little group. He first took us to the chapel where he showed up this rectangle in the floor. He said that they used this hole to lower caskets once the funeral was over onto boats which were waiting in the river below. I never thought I would find a funeral fact so interesting. See, even funeral facts are better in france.

Then gabriel lead us through another few rooms, explaining some things I didn’t quite understand/thought he was making things up as we went along but of course I still enjoyed it. Each room had a really nice floral bouquet of sorts. I might have ended up taking more pictures of the flowers inside then the actual rooms so it only makes sense that gabriel asked me why I liked flowers so much.

Towards the end of our “tour”, Gabriel took me, dorene and melinda (at that point we were the only ones left) down to the basement. The basement served as the castles kitchen area. Even though I know it had been renovated, it was still the prettiest concrete kitchen I had ever seen. I adored the arches in the ceiling and kept thinking about how I want my dream kitchen or maybe even house to be inspired by a french castle. Since I always plan ahead I felt the need to take a picture of the ceiling to show my future architect. I had forgotten to turn my flash off and somehow out of no where a lady over some sort of intercom asks me (in french) to not take pictures with flash but there was no one around! I am convinced that either they have a surveillance camera and some one sitting there just waiting to tell people their flash is on by mistake or that there is some sort of censor that just knows. Regardless I was shocked and a bit embarrassed, maybe my future kitchen ceiling wasn’t worth all of that.

After going through the castle which was bigger than da vinci’s house but smaller than the chambord castle, we ate lunch and then walked around some bit more until we had to leave for paris. On our way back I was thinking about how nice it will be to get back to our apartment. As excited as I was to see all these beautiful castles and places, I was more excited realizing that I officially thought of my apartment in paris as home.

All in an all, c’etait un bon weekend! (It was a good weekend!)