Day 10: Tours to Villandry *Joe's comments added

August 18, 2024

Now with Joe's edits

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Through the streets of Tours, the town looked more attractive than we remembered. This must be because we stayed off the main street, which is shot through with streetcars and their tracks.

Many streets are narrow, and at least signed for bicycles.

After a bit of noodling around, coping with cycle route signage that as often happens in cities, was non-existent, we found ourselves out along not so much the Loire, as the Cher. As you can see on the above map, the Cher runs largely parallel to the Loire.

There are several styles of boats characteristic of the Loire: The largest boat on the Loire, the Gabare is a boat with a white or red sail, weighing around 22 tonnes that was used to transport goods. The smaller Toue boat is a typical fishing vessel. It can be “Cabanée” (featuring a small cabin). These boats are still used for fishing, and we found them also used by tour operators.

The Cher is a small and very peaceful river.

At about the half way point, the kids are getting refueled.

Down by the river, kids search for fish.

Amelia gets set up with roses for her bike.

The sunflowers are a source of continuing wonder, both for kids and for adults. Of course, the major topic is how they are often so rude as to turn away from us. We think these are reasonably well behaved.

This old grain mill on the Cher had been replaced by an ugly modern box nearby. It had begun as soley water powered, before getting a bit of motor assist, and finally being decommissioned.

La Savonierre is very near to Villandry. It has this fun paved dip. In the photo, Amelia and Dodie can be seen as havingf decided to walk down, but the little blip in the distance is Joe, who blasted down.

Ah, the Villandry chateau in the distance but captured by the camera zoom.

A note about the camera zoom: As had befallen the 30x zoom Lumix ZS60 and related cameras, used by Scott Anderson, Susan Carpenter, Suzanne Gibson, and others on Cycleblaze, mine died yesterday. I buried it deep in a pack, hoping to apply heat, air, lube, dry, or ?? when we get home. But for now, I am back to the little 20x zoom Nikon S7000.

We generally prefer real hotels to AirBnB arrangements, not least because finding the AirBnB thing is often a treasure hunt, and the entry instructions are usually some sort of puzzle. For example, with the one in Chaumont, there was a combination lock on the gate, that gave access to a garden that had a lock box that gave a key to open a mailbox revealing further keys to some obvious rooms and some behind hidden doors and up stairs!

Today, we got a message saying that all the previous instructions were void, and the place not avaialble, but that the owner has another, larger place, and all we have to do is phone for new instructions. Yeah, right. At first we got no answer and mailbox full. But later, we connected and got instructions. Eventually it turned out we had three floors of a real house, with scads of rooms and beds and kitchens and terraces. But we had to work to uncover the fact that our place was not just the room on the ground floor.

The structure of our trip is for travel of under 30 km at the start of the day, after which we are planned to reach both the place to stay, and the exciting chateau or other activity. The first premise of that plan is to set off fairly early in the morning. In practice, I must say, we are not too successful with that. The next idea, is to do the exciting activity, and then to proceed to where we are going to stay. But twice now, on reaching the activity, kids have wanted to go to the hotel and rest instead, or maybe first. As I write this, we have indeed bypassed Villandry Chateau and to my mind we are languising in the gite, at 4:30 p.m. However, it is possible we will toddle over to the Chateau sometime soon. If you see a bunch of garden photos below, it means it did happen after all!

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Aha, here we are at the Chateau after all. They were open until 7, perhaps not enough time to visit the buildings and the gardens, but it was the gardens we were really interested in. The gardens are in the form of formal French Renaissance design - so unlike an English country garden, or Monet's garden. We do rather like it, though, and in this case we have many acres of plants of all types. Whether organized or natural, we love to see all the varieties.

There were nine different designs of the box hedges in the foreground.

Église Saint-Étienne, behind the gardens.

KIDS'S TAKE

Joe:

Today's ride: 26 km (16 miles)
Total: 203 km (126 miles)

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