Bill:

So, I’m sitting at an ancient wooden desk right now, in a cozy little French bedroom on the top floor of the antique Hotel val de Loire, gazing out of the skylight of our low angled ceiling at the moon. This is our second night in Tours, France—and it’s been grand so far.

Our trip from Inverness to Stansted was concise, with the flight only over an hour. We were able to call the nearby ‘Bushel and Sack’ hotel that we had reservations with from the airport and arrange for them to send someone out to pick us up. An aging Englishman pulled up in a silver van some fifteen minutes later at the end of row D in the orange car park. Unfortunately, there was some sort of error with our room, so the hotel organized for us to stay somewhere else nearby for the night, with no alteration in room accommodations or charges. After some small confusion with the coarse English of the woman behind the reservations desk at the new place, we were off to our room, which was quite a leap from the hostels we’ve been to so far! A private white-tiled bathroom and double bed were real luxuries for us, and while we didn’t do anything significant that night (since it was meant only as a necessary stopover between our flights from Inverness and to France), it made for good sleeping.

The next day we headed off to Stansted airport (which was about a hundred times larger and busier than Inverness) and waited in line for about an hour to check in with Ryanair. We have discovered that the weight limits for the Ryanair flights are lower than normal, and we’re going to have to use Cassie’s backpack as an extra checked bag for 10 pounds (or equivalent) wherever we fly with them, having stuffed as much of our suitcase into it as humanly possible to get the massive black behemoth under the weight limit. In any case, we got to France fine—the flight was short and had sweet leather seats.

After arriving in France, we hopped through customs (literally just a Frenchman standing at the airport door who glanced at your passport and gave it a stamp) and embarked on the next leg of our European adventure. The first day was only a half-day, having arrived in the early afternoon, and we decided to use it to acquaint ourselves with our surroundings and discover what exactly there was to explore for our full days. We’d heard about some ‘castles or something’ near this area of France that we thought we should look into, and to our surprise there are actually literally a dozen or more scattered in the immediate area around this part of the Loire valley. Tourists come here SPECIFICALLY to see the castles!

Also to our relief, our basic grasp of the French language seems to be paying off even more than we anticipated. Thus far, we’ve been able to communicate whenever we’ve approached anyone or bought anything with every bit of clarity necessary to get the job done. It’s hard to imagine holding a meaningful conversation, but thankfully the ‘tourist French’ we learned in high school and college has been perfect for our purposes. We can read very much of the signs, captions, brochures, and menus that we come across, greet and thank people, place orders for all types of food, purchase souvenirs or bus tickets (even on the phone!), ask questions about places, words, or directions, and most importantly of all—notify people that we are American and speak French poorly, and only a little bit of it (ironically in near-perfect French). Many people here seem to speak at least some English as a second language though, and after addressing them in French they are completely willing to make an effort at English for our sakes. It’s not difficult to get around at all!

Our hotel is in an old French building in central Tours, right around the corner from the train station. It’s a beautiful, cozy old place, with a spiral staircase going up three floors, no elevator, and creaky wooden floors. The bedroom is warm and comfy, and quaintly French. The man who runs the hotel speaks English quite well, although with a French accent, and has given us guidance when necessary, but we’ve mostly gotten around on our own.

Yesterday we collected a large handful of castle and touring brochures and took them back to our room to sift through, eventually coming up with a well organized day-long trip by minivan with an English-speaking chauffeur that would take us to visit a number of the castles that we really wanted to see, give us time to explore them (plus a discount on our entree fees), and even stop for lunch in the middle of the journey. We made a reservation over the phone without too much trouble…other than some confusion over what exactly to dial…and hit the sack. Today we embarked from the tour’s information kiosk in the train station at 9:30am with a French woman (our guide), a middle-aged Australian couple (just arrived from touring in Spain), a Japanese guy about our age (who spoke a little English and next to no French), a Chinese couple our age (fluent in Chinese, French, and English!), and another young woman from the Philippines (who spoke English as well), all to hop into a minivan and take a ride up and down the Loire river valley to see some castles! The French woman who was our driver and guide did speak English, but (apologetically) very roughly. She admitted to never having studied it, but despite the bad grammar and overwhelming accent, it was not very difficult to understand her and interpret the histories that she told us about the castles we were going to visit. I can’t even begin to describe how cool the four castles we visited were to walk around and explore, but you’ll be able to see the pictures and get the drift. They were all early to late renaissance designs, with distinctly French-looking pointy roofs and tons of stuff to see. In a way, they were almost like a cross between castles and mansions…displaying many elements of a large house, but distinctly reminiscent of the stone keeps like the one we saw at Leed’s Castle in England. All in all, they were much less medieval seeming, and far more decorative and delicious to the eye. The first one we saw was Le Chateau Chenonceau, a cool stone castle-mansion built literally OVER the water of the Loire river on giant arches, and surrounded by gorgeous gardens. After that we headed to Le Chateau D’Amboise, which was extremely high up on a grassy plateau edged with stone walls to the ground below, and where we even got to set eyes upon the grave of Leonardo Da Vinci! Following that we had ourselves a mouth-watering lunch of French pastries and such, and rejoined the group at the van. Our next stop was an hour upriver, at Le Chateau de Chambord—by far the grandest and most wonderful of our tour. The pure concentration of artistic architecture that went into the sprawling parapets and towers is beyond description. It is thought that Leonardo Da Vinci aided in its design, in such elements as the double-spiral staircase in the center of the keep! Our final stop of the day was Le Chateau de Cheverny, which was much more like a massive 16th century French mansion than a “castle” per-se. Stunning nonetheless, and full of historical tidbits and breathtaking sights on the surrounding estate. We got to see a whole pack of real hunting dogs in their kennel—extremely cute.

By the time our tour group finally got back to Tours at the end of the trip, it was 7pm and we were extremely exhausted (and satisfied). After relaxing for a while in our rooftop bedroom in lovely France, Cassie fell asleep and I began to type up this lengthy account of our exploits so far. As I finish writing this up it is now 10:30, and I think I’ll be grabbing some shut-eye myself. Tomorrow Cassie and I are going to sleep in for the first time since we left Winchester (traveling has been so incredibly fatiguing!), so I’ll sap that for what I can get until she drags me out of bed. We plan to hike over to the internet café on the next block and see what we can do about posting our hordes of journaling and pictures. The next day we’ll catch a train to Paris and see what happens from there! Stay tuned—Bill, signing off.