Chateaus, chateaus, and more chateaus

Day 17 France 2012

Helen continues to entertain and amaze us with her ability to mispronounce names that are so funny we are laughing as we drive along.  We go by a small town of St. Marcel, and she calls it “Street Marcel.”  Highway A-10 is Highway A-10, but Highway D-6-A becomes Highway D-6-ah.

We have seen yellow bushes on the sides of the roads all over France.  They look like forsythia from afar, but look totally different up close.  Patti has been doing a great job of looking up answers to all our mysteries.  She found out that the rosebushes are planted in vineyards to help detect mildew on the grapevines and yesterday looked up our purple/blue flowers and found out that they are called Viper's Bugloss or Blueweed.  Thanks, Patti!

We are driving in the Loire River valley now, and this is home to beautiful chateaus.  We have seen most of the major ones on previous visits, but decided we should see a few more while we were in the area. In this area, everywhere you look is a photo op with a beautiful chateau or house perched on a hillside.  We saw this one in Le Pont Chretten.

The first big chateau we saw was Azay-Le-Ferron.

The next one was La Celle-Guenard.

As we got closer to Chinon, we saw vineyards again with lots of domaine names and chateau designations.  Once we got to Chinon, we saw the magnificent walled city high on the hill.  Joan of Arc is connected to Chinon.

Helen was taking us to see the chateau of Usse  (the castle Perrault used as his model for Sleeping Beauty) and managed to take us out on more tiny country roads through fields.  We came upon an encampment of vans and trailers and campers and realized that it was a Gypsy camp.  We had read that France still had Gypsy groups that traveled around.  We were surprised to have just come up on one.

Our next chateau was Azay-le-Rideau.  Its claim to fame is that it is surrounded on 3 sides by water and it makes a wonderful photo because of its reflection in the water.  There were workmen preparing for the summer light show, though, so most of the water was drained out so that they could get everything set up.  Many of the chateaus in this area put on big production light shows in July and August.

Earlier in the day, as we were driving on D-6-ah, we drove through what we called lake country.  There was a huge nature preserve with many hikers and bikers in the area and lakes all over the place.  As we drove through, we came upon this sign:

 We had seen lots of these signs all over France:  

 Well, now Leon decided that we should take photos of all the signs of this type that we saw, so we went on the lookout for fun signs.  Here are a couple more that we found.

 And then, of course, we had to post the most common one!


 

We went to our B&B in Le Bardon and got checked in, unloaded the car, and drove over to Beaugency to have dinner.  This is the town that Caroline lived in with a French family back when she was in high school.  Our own  family had visited them in 1999 when we were in France.  We had a nice dinner and drove around just to reacquaint our selves.  Some things looked just the same, and others were very different, but it was still fun to visit.

Leon had tuna tartare...I stuck with plain old foie gras on toast.

I had perch...the dark stuff at the top is rice cooked with mushrooms and something that turned it dark grey.  It tasted good, just looked sort of unappetizing.

Leon had the lamb.

Desserts were the best, though.  I had grilled pineapple and vanilla mousse with fresh fruit on top.

Leon had a sampler of strawberry soup, flan, pineapple, brownie, and vanilla sauce.  Yum!

This ancient bridge is over the Loire River in Beaugency.  Legend has it that it was built by the Devil!  It was built in the 14th century and for several centuries was the only bridge over the Loire between Orleans and Blois. Beaugency is also famous because Joan of Arc freed it from the English in 1429.