End of Week 4 – The Loire to Versailles

In the last few days, we’ve been to a chateau, a local town market, an American BBQ, camped through two of the most amazing electrical storms we’ve ever experienced, eaten a meal we’ve waited 5 years to repeat, finished camping and moved to the outskirts of Paris – busy, exciting, and sometimes frightening. 

The chateau was at Chaumont.  This is another chateau that had been in private ownership, but was taken over by the state when the owners ran into financial difficulty in the 1930’s.  Today the chateau is also known for it international garden exhibition that exists within its grounds.  People are invited to create an exhibit, and this year there are 25 of them for us to wander around.  Like most artistic ventures, there was some real gold, and some not so inspiring stuff, but our favourites are shown in the photos.  It was a good couple of hours wandering round different garden settings. 

The Chateau itself was quite interesting, for a big house.  There were of course, some very nice rooms, but continuing the arty theme of the place, there was also an art exhibition in the disused (and entirely run down) part of the chateau.  The art was essentially photographs made into led light stained glass panel that were hung in front of windows in these unused rooms.  While the art was interesting enough, it was interesting to see what happens to these massive houses, when the upkeep gets too much, and the family retreats to much smaller well kept parts of the chateau.

The highlight of lunch was being told off by a very officious, French speaking, young woman on a horse.  We had bought a filled roll, and were sitting on a small wall beside a nice lawn, actually we were sitting over the fence on the grass, which despite the fact that the Chateau had acre after acre of grass, you weren’t allowed on the grass, so we thought she was telling us off for having the audacity for putting out bottoms on the grass, but then in turned out that there was a reserved area at the back of a building for people to eat their sandwiches, and we had to go there, so as not to make the place look untidy.

The French town markets are always enjoyable, and different areas obviously have different local flavours, some are little more than the local retailers moving their goods onto tables out onto the street (Bayeux), but others are a real mish mash of local producers, artists, crafts people who come together in a different town each day to sell their wares.  The best ones are in the South of France – Provence and the Dordogne, because there you do get such a wide range of things on offer – particularly art.

The market we visited this time was in Loches, about 30ks down the road.  This market covered most of the centre of the town, and had lots of fish, meat, cheese, bread stalls, some clothes, jewellery, and hand bags.  The highlight for me was seeing that they sold dead pigeons – it seemed the only good thing to do with pigeons, which are still occupying too much of my attention at the start and end of each day.  Anne bought a nice scarf and a handbag in the market, which was cool.

Lunch was interesting, in that we chose the restaurant, requested our usual table for two outside, and sat down to wait for the menu to arrive.  Next thing, the entrée arrives, then the main, finally desert and coffee.  We didn’t realise, but the restaurant only had a set menu – it was a one man band operating everything, and all we had to do was order the pitcher of wine.  As luck would have it, the lunch was very good, and probably the most reasonably priced food we’ve eaten on the holiday.

Evenings at the camp ground have been interesting.  It starts off with the hot air balloons that float over us every night.  The first night, there was only one, but since then, business has been up, and on a couple of nights we saw 5 of them.  Then one night, the campground put on an American BBQ, and a musician, so we went along to that.  The BBQ was good, and the musician excellent.  For some reason, we got front row seats – it might have been that it started at 7:00pm, which is very early for us.  It was a very enjoyable evening, good food, good music, and we got to meet the Dutch family that are camping next to us.

Then there are the electrical storms – Amazing!  They start about 3am, with Continuous thunder and lightning, rain, and on the second night, really strong winds.  Night one, we were woken by the thunder, which coincided with the rain starting, and carried on for a couple of hours.  Night two, I could see the lightning off in the distance, and the thunder was barely audible.  Anne was awake, there was no wind, so being an aspiring Jim Hickey, I said, “it’s miles away, it should pass us by”.  Queue the wind, which we thought was going to blow the tent away.  That got things moving, and sure enough the storm arrived minutes later.  It was interesting watching the lightning start off visible through the wall of the tent at our feet, then start lighting up the whole roof of the tent, then migrate on to the wall behind our heads.  We wondering about going and sitting in the car to watch the show, but we would have got drenched getting to the car, and anyway, we were well protected by our tent – right?  After the first incident of rain, we don’t have anything in the tent at night, because the water gets in under the tent – nothing gets wet, as long as it isn’t on the floor of the tent, and if it’s in the car, then it’s not on the floor of the tent.  All our bedding, and us, is on top of the air bed, so it doesn’t get wet at all. Morning dawns to blue skies both days – amazing !

The two electrical storms came on the last two nights we had planned to camp, so it did have a benefit in that the tent got a good wash before we had to pack it up in preparation for getting it back through NZ Customs.  A couple of hours in the morning, and the tent was dried out and packed up.  Saturday night was spent in Amboise, the scene of one of the most enjoyable lunches I’ve ever had, 5 years ago, and we were keen to go back to re-live the experience.  The highlight was the delightfully named Geese Gizzard salad, and much to my delight, the item was still on the menu, and also much to my delight, the experience was as enjoyable as I recalled it 5 years ago.  Anne’s meal was also very enjoyable, but she went for more traditional fare than the Geese Gizzard salad.

First night back in a hotel and of course there was no electrical storm.  The receptionist at the hotel was full of stories about the amazing storm they had endured the night before, and was then pretty gob smacked when we advised that we had been camping just down the road that night.

Tonight we are in a hotel in Versailles, and drop the car off tomorrow morning, and have 3 nights in Paris, before heading back home on Thursday.  I’ll get one more blog post in before we leave.