Amboise

Thursday October 4, 2007

The first picture is Chaumont, peeking out through the mist. The others are at the Chateau Royal in Amboise.

So much for rained out skies! This morning it was misty and overcast, but we headed out for Amboise anyway. We decided to start at Chaumont sur Loire, just for a peek. And that’s all we got, because it was still pretty dismal by the time we arrived. This castle is one of the few owned by the French government, but we stopped only for a quick pic and then moved down the river to Amboise. This was a destination previously visited by us with Jessie & Aaron in 1993. It was as vital and impressive now as then. With all the recent rain, the river was severely swollen, but there are two important tour destinations here – the chateau and da Vinci’s house 400m up the road, and we went to both of them. The chateau allowed no interior pictures, but we got lots of exterior shots, illustrating this chateau’s impressive location. We then walked up to the last home of Leonardo da Vinci before he died. Apparently he arrived at this home with a number of prize possessions that included the Mona Lisa, which he sold to the king of France, ensuring that the Mona Lisa would end up in a French rather than Italian museum. IBM has created working models here of many of da Vinci’s revolutionary plans, like his airplane, tank and automobile – a good 400 years ahead of their time.

No pique nique today due to cool and overcast conditions, so we had lunch at a nice Spanish-style café on the river. Following that, we headed home via the autoroute and quickly found ourselves back in Barrou where we had another great meal to finish up the day.

The picture following this was taken on the outskirts of Barrou, illustrating the greeness of the land.