I'm so happy to be finally typing these words after wrestling with blogger.com for 3 and 1/2 days trying to load these photos. I'll never attempt to include so many again but this is a special case: we spent a long weekend in the Loire valley, which is like a giant real-life theme park of fantastic castles and gardens, and my trigger finger is still aching from the photographic orgy I indulged in - over 400 shots in 3 days. This blog will be in 2 parts, in roughly chronological order, and I'll let the pictures do most of the talking. Allons'y!
On Thursday, December 27th, our niece Aja arrived for a 2-week visit. The next morning we all boarded the TGV train for a 5-hour ride to Tours, the largest town in the central Loire valley. That evening we walked around Tours, past the cathedral (see photos), found a good little French Italian restaurant whose owner, we discovered, had spent time in Cleveland, and slept in a lovely small 2-star hotel (Hotel du Manoir) whose proprietors gave us 2 triple rooms for the price of doubles because that's all they had left. Okay, we said, if you insist. Up early the next morning, a hearty hotel breakfast under our belts, and off we went to Villandry, the first stop in our itinerary.
Villandry was built in 1536 by the French finance minister of the timeand was owned from the late 19th century by a Spanish/American family the matron of which had inherited a vast fortune from her Pennsylvania industrialist father. They spent much of the fortune renovating the place, especially the gardens, which are the highlight of the whole trip, in my opinion. A garden in winter may be kind of drab, but you can see the bone structure, so to speak, which is obscured during bloom season. I loved it and took way too many pictures, some of which follow in both this page and part 2. The picture above is of our Michael and his namesake, St. Michael, who is busily engaged in spearing a demon, for the sake of its eternal soul, no doubt. The fancy ceiling was originally in a castle somewhere else (Spain, maybe?) but the Carvallo/Colemans had it dismantled, shipped to France, and reassembled.
The weather during our visit was wintry, cold and rainy, which drastically reduced tourist traffic. We were the only ones in the gardens for most of the time. During the season, it's packed, as you can imagine.
Although we hadn't planned to, it would be fun to visit Villandry again next summer on our way home and see it in its full flower.
The other half of this post covers the rest of the trip.
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