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.

Village etape, purple flowers, hay bales, and a pig farmer from England

Day 16 France 2012

We had a grand send-off from Sarlat as we were driving out of town when we heard a roaring noise overhead, and there was a trio of jets sending out contrails of red, white, and blue smoke.  The trio was led by a lone jet.  The noise was so loud that we both ducked in the car since it sounded like they were right on top of us.  Of course, they were long gone by the time I could get the camera out.

As we drove north, we encountered lots of hills with walnut groves and cornfields.  We came across a small field with literally hundreds of ducks under some walnut trees.  We decided that the corn in this area is used to feed the ducks and geese that are grown for foie gras.

In the small village of Paulin, we saw this castle.

We kept seeing signs about towns labeled as “Village Etape.”  We had no clue what they were, so decided to stop in one, go to the tourist office and ask.  We found out that meant that these villages were perfect tourist towns with places to stay, eat, and activities for entertainment.  This particular Village Etape had a beautiful church right on the town square with a WWI memorial in front that just brought tears to my eyes.  There were 89 names on the memorial and were listed as young men who died for France.  The WWII memorial nearby only had 11 names on it.  It really brought home how the population of young men was devastated by WWI.  

The tourist bureau gave us info on one of the “Beau Villages” that was just down the road, so we drove there.  There was a castle across a little river and an ancient church.  The stone steps inside the church had been worn down from all the worshipers over the centuries.  There was a tomb of someone who had been killed during the Crusades in 1266.  There was an effigy over the tomb and I thought it was a woman because it looked like the person was wearing a dress.  It was only after I read the plaque that I realized it was a man.  The basement of the church had paintings on the ceiling that reminded us of the cave paintings we saw in Turkey.

There was a big sign by the road outside Limoges saying that this was Limousine cattle country, and we saw several herds of them.

Lots of towns in this area end in the letters AC:  Parnac, Rilhac, Ambazac, Bonnac, Margnac.

We saw purple flowers in clusters all along the big highway A-20.  We did not see the red poppies any more, just these purple flowers that looked like the lupines that we saw in Nova Scotia.  They had tall spikes covered with flowers.  I wanted to get a photo of them, but we could not stop on the big highway, and when we finally got off onto smaller roads, the purple flowers had disappeared.  I was determined to get a photo, so we looked and looked for them and finally spotted a few.  Leon pulled off to let me get a photo and we realized that close up, the flowers are blue!  From a distance they all looked purple.  There were some pink ones that were a little different, so I got a photo of them, too. 

We have enjoyed seeing all of the agricultural land here, and got a chuckle out of these fields with their bales of hay. We had seen the bales that looked like marshmallows before, but had not seen the black and white striped ones. 

Helen got us to our little B&B way out in the country.  Our hosts were preparing dinner for us, and it was fabulous.  There was another couple staying there, and they ate with us.  They have a vacation home in France but live in Northern England, and the husband is a pig farmer.  He has about 4,000 sows and raises free range pigs.  He said it is a niche market, and his pork is sold to high end stores.  He said that there are large estates nearby, and he leases their farmland on a crop rotation basis.  It was really interesting to learn all about his farming operation. 

 Leon enjoying a little vino before dinner.

This is the hot goat cheese salad we had for our entree.

Sausage stuffed chicken with a white wine sauce and vegetables for our main course.

Raspberry sherbet on a brownie swimming in vanilla sauce with fresh raspberries for dessert.

Some observations:  There is very little trash on the streets, highways, and roads here.  Houses have working shutters that they close in the heat of the day.  Nobody has screens on their windows.  France does not have washcloths in bathrooms no matter where you are.  European credit cards have chips in them, but American credit cards have magnetic strips that do not work in lots of places.  The console in our car has an AC vent in the bottom that cools our drinks…it is also large enough to hold two 2-liter bottles of water, 2 sandwiches on baguettes, 2 canned drinks, Leon’s sunglasses, and our binoculars!

Rain, sunshine, and walking tours from Z to A and A to Z

Day 15 France 2012

It was raining when we awoke this morning.  We did indeed sleep about 10 hours.  We were not sure we got breakfast with this B&B but Herve came by our dinner table last night to ask what time we wanted breakfast.  We took our Rick Steves’ book down to breakfast, and Herve saw it.  He said that Steve Smith, who is co-author of Rick’s France books, was here at Le Petit Manoir day before yesterday and is going to be in Sarlat for the next 3 days.  I guess that he is doing research for the newest edition.  

We came back to our room and did a little computer work while we waited for the rain to let up.  When it did, we walked up to the car and got my umbrella and our jackets since it had turned off cool with the rain.  We decided to walk around the old town according to a walking tour that Rick has in his tour book.  Leon thought that since we were at the end of the walk already that we could just do it backwards.  I was trying to read the descriptions and was so confused because the descriptions would often refer to things that we had already walked by.  One good thing about the walk was that the market in the old parish church was open (the one with the huge seven-ton doors), so we were able to pick up some goodies to have in Paris next week. 

 

 There was a race going on this morning right through the middle of town, so we watched several of the runners as they went by.

 It seemed that most of the English speaking visitors had gone from the town.  We picked up a couple of sandwiches and came back to our room and ate lunch. 

The rain stopped and the sun came out, so Leon decided we needed to do our walking tour all over again from the starting point in Rick’s book.  All of the photos we had taken this morning were done in cloudy and rainy weather anyway.  The walking tour was much better in the correct order!  I am such a librarian at heart that it really bothers me to do things from Z to A.  We took all our photos over again, and they look much better with blue skies and sunshine.  In spite of the disappointment of the market yesterday, today’s walking tours of Sarlat reminded us just what an interesting and historical place this is.

Our B&B has a wonderful spiral staircase.  We read that there are 20 of these spiral staircases in Sarlat.

The Cathedral of St. Sacerdos has some 12^th century carvings on the exterior, but most of it is from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  When the plague came back around in 1348, the faithful believed that Mary delivered them from it, so there are lots of things dedicated to the Virgin Mary here and in the old town. The church was closed for services when we were walking this morning, but was open this afternoon.  We always make Diana light a candle when she is with us and we visit churches, so the red one on the bottom right is one we lit today for her..  

One of the columns has a list of all the local men who died in WWI.

Behind the cathedral is a rocket shaped building that was built in 1147 and is the oldest monument in town.  In four days, the plague killed one fourth of the population, and so the people prayed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux who blessed their bread and also instituted hygiene standards that stopped the disease.  The Lantern of the Dead was built in gratitude to St. Bernard.

The salamander is the mascot of Sarlat.  It is on the city crest, is on the wind vane on top of the cathedral, and has a street named for it.

We were fascinated by the stone roofs we saw because they are different from other roofs we have seen on this trip.  These are lauzes or roofs made of stones gathered by farmers clearing their fields.  It was cheap roofing materials that generally lasted 300 years or more.  The small windows in the roofs provide air circulation that allows the lichen that coat the porous stone to grow, sealing the gaps between the stones and waterproofing the roof.  

The Place des Oies is where the goose market takes place from November – March.  Remember that geese and foie gras are big businesses in this area.

For generations, this was the only source of water for the city.  This 14^th century vault leads to a fountain that is supposedly protected by the Virgin Mary.  

The House of Etienne la Boetie was a typical sixteenth century merchant’s home with business downstairs and home upstairs.  It was built during a time when anything Italian was in fashion.

We took a little break to have something to drink.  Leon tried out a Belgian beer, but I stuck with good old Coke.

We continued our tour with  the old Bishop’s Palace, next door to the cathedral.  It is another example of Italian influence.  The Italian bishop who lived here was a special friend of Queen Catherine of Medici, a connection that got him this fine house.  A few years later, he skipped town with lots of local money, so it caused quite a scandal.  

Many of Sarlat’s Renaissance buildings come from the period after the Hundred Years’ War (1450  1550) when the king rewarded Sarlat for its loyalty by giving the town money to rebuild itself in stone.  Sarlat’s new nobility needed fine new houses that are still standing today.

I sort of liked this little cottage up on a side street.