Month: July 2018

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Château de Chambord

The main word that comes to mind is “ostentatious”. I mean, building a giant, spired, wood-paneled, fake-castle/palace as your summer home (or in this case, hunting lodge) is alway ostentatious, but this one really seemed to do it more.

Just look at it!

From a distance
Getting closer…
Can you see that this is a detail on the roof and it’s still enormous?

It was only used for seven weeks total by the builder (in the 16th Century), in part because it’s completely impractical.  It’s too big and open to heat effectively and there was no nearby village to supply food so everything had to be carried in for the 2000 or so guests who would arrive all at once.  But it has some really neat features.  One of the most famous is the double helix staircase.  Two staircases spiral around each other and you can stop at the internal windows and look at your friends going up the opposite stair.

Looking up the center of the staircase

And there are fire-salamanders everywhere, and who is not a fan of fire-salamanders?

Fiery king salamander

And, as usual, the gardens were vast and impressive.

There was an equestrian show at an outdoor pavilion on the grounds that I missed, and I’m a bit sorry I did because it sounded amazing.  Next time, I guess?

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Mushroom Cave

So you’ve got a vast network of damp, dark, underground, limestone tunnels.  What do you do with them?  Grow mushrooms of course. We visited a cave used to grow shiitake, champignon de Paris, oyster and ‘blue foot’/Pied bleu mushrooms.  The blue foot were my favorites, but Sylvia, surprisingly, was a fan of the Parisian.  We got to pull some directly out of the beds and eat them. Later, in the shop we purchased a half kilo and made risotto for dinner out of them.  I brought back a jar of the blue foot and have yet to decide what to do with them.

The tour was officially in French but our guide spoke English so she took the time to either translate for us or to pantomime so effectively that we didn’t need to know exactly what she said.

Of interest: the shiitake mushrooms are grown in cubes resting on the floor and they said it was important to their growth to periodically whack the cubes. I’m wondering if ‘mushroom walloper’ is a good thing to put on your resume.

Parisian and Pied Bleu are grown like this, you can see the moisture hanging in the air.
Oyster Mushrooms

Of course there’s extra tunnel space.  What to do with it? In this case a stonemason and and artist came down and carved an underground village there. Many of my photos didn’t turn out.  There were shop doors, with a cat sneaking along, trees and balconies.

 

And just outside there was this pretty little cluster of flowers.

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Château de Chenonceau

This château has everything: white stone towers, a river, grand rooms, complicated gardens, a tree-lined path and a hedge maze.  We may be early in our journey, but I declared it “Peak Castle” all other castles are downhill from here.  Technically I consider this a ‘palace’ – a non-defensive structure, leaving room for me to really enjoy some less elaborate and more defensive structures.  While we were there we saw a few people paddling by in canoes which also seems a great way to view it.

I was impressed by the amount of copper-ware in the kitchens and the vast black-and-white checkerboard tiles in the long gallery that spans the river, but the best part was definitely the exterior of the castle and the grounds, which were stunning.

Note the person reading on the wall above the river.
View from the far side of the river, over a little drawbridge.
Just a glimpse of one of the gardens.
Hedge maze!
More of the garden visible.

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Troglodyte House, Poce-sur-Cisse, France

Hello again!

We’ve been away on a 3-week long trip to France and now that we are back it’s time to go through the photos. I always liked the idea of traveling with children, but it turns out that I find organizing for that many people stressful, so we kept putting it off.  Finally, I noticed that my oldest was 18 and if we wanted to do a major, whole-family trip, I had better act now.

For our first three days we stayed in a ‘troglodyte house’, a home partially built into the limestone hillside behind it.  I really love the idea that if you ever thought your house was too small you could just continue to dig into it and make it bigger.

 

This one has some remnants of an old wine press in it.  The back rooms were wonderfully cool, which we enjoyed because temperatures in France were very hot for our entire stay. A house two down from this one was for sale, and while we loved staying there, the rooms are also perpetually damp and that might get old after a while.

Church and canal in Poce-sur-Cisse
Outside the troglodyte house at night.

This little canal and bridge was in town, near the patisserie. It did not take much time at all for us to get used to the ubiquitous presence of fresh daily baguettes and pastries within walking distance.  The baguettes were inexpensive, generally .8 euros or less, which is FAR less than I would expect to pay for them in the US.

At night it was very quiet and dark, all the street lamp went out at midnight giving a good view of the sky.   In the early morning we saw hot-air balloons in the distance.  When we had free time at home, we listened to “Coffee Break French” podcast to try to prepare ourselves for actual conversations.