Roll Up For the Mystery Tours: Southern France, Day 11

One of our preferred travel techniques (“tip” is a strong word, just something that works for us) is to stay in places with at least a baby kitchenette in it. When we’re on the road for more than a few days, constant eating in restaurants just starts to be a bore. Even surrounded by amazing restaurants in every direction, sometimes you just want a ham sandwich or a bowl of cereal; at least, we do. And so, on the morning of this, our 11th day of the trip, we broke our fast with bowls of Special K. Ah, the exciting life of the world traveler. Fortunately, whatever majesty and wonder was lacking in our cereal bowls would be amply made up for at our destination for the day: Tours. And if that isn’t one of the sweatiest transitions you’ve ever read in your life, I just don’t know what more I can do for you.

Tours is just a hop and a skip from Amboise; it’s this sort of thing that made us choose Amboise as a hub in the first place. A quick hop across the draught-depleted Loire, then take a left and go for 20 minutes, it just doesn’t get much simpler than that. Small confession: we thought Tours was a bigger city than it actually is. Partially this came from a couple people in Amboise talking about how that’s where they went for your classic “going into town” chores. The city has just over 100,000 people in it, which certainly ain’t a village but still, Tours manages to hold onto a lot of small-town vibes that wasn’t precisely what we were expecting. It was nice though. We could park on the street with not a pay machine in sight, a major change from our time in Nice. Of the two attractions we were there to see, we shared them with no more than a double hand-full of people (not counting the congregation at stop #1).

Attraction #1? Cathédrale Saint-Gatien de Tours, a 12th-15th century gothic masterpiece. (It took a long time to build, even for a cathedral.) It was a Sunday, so while it was our first actual stop we tried to be respectful – more respectful than some other tourists that were nosing around, that’s for sure. *ahem* It’s a beautiful old building, but we were particularly struck by the fact that it was a functioning church above all else. Some of the cathedrals we’ve been to feel almost like amusement parks with the signage and the lighting (and the lines, and the admission prices…). The big one in Barcelona comes to mind; I mean, sure, Sagrada Familia is a wonderous bit of architecture but theoretically it’s also a church. We’re not even particularly religious but those places can still give us a bit of cognitive dissonance. Here in Tours, however, the Cathedral is most definitely a functioning hub for the religious community. All of the signage at the front of the building is straight off the corkboard of whatever church you’ve ever been to – bake sales, fundraisers, sick parishioners to keep in your thoughts, that sort of thing. The main concession to visitors is that there are signs set up to explain what the stained-glass windows way overhead actually depict, but that’s mostly because you’d have to be a bird to make them out. We didn’t want to bother the nice folks going about their Sunday rituals so we stepped out for lunch.

Lunch was just a short hop anyway, to Les Canailles. We’re getting to be a broken record on this subject, but we once again knew very little about the place other than some impersonal online reviews, and we once again had a delicious meal. My grilled fish and Lisa’s pork were both perfectly prepared, and a recommendation from the server for a local wine tickled Lisa’s fancy immensely. Sitting out on the sidewalk and watching people go by – in what was a much shaggier neighborhood than we’d been hanging out in lately in Amboise – was an extra bit of French tourism at no additional charge. Lunch done, we ambled back to the now-vacated (mostly) Cathedral to poke around at the stained glass and to find the one bit of French history on display there – the tomb of the infant children of Charles VIII and Anne of Bretagne. It is… odd, seeing such an ornate sepulchre for a three-year-old and a literal baby, both presented in royal regalia. Then again, we didn’t even get the paw print clay impression that they offered for Sasha and Leo*, so different strokes I guess.

One block over from the Cathedral, because the French don’t mess around, is le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours. Just FYI – if you’re ever at a trivia night and the question is “where did the Ringling Brothers – Barnum & Bailey Circus leave behind an elephant carcass to be stuffed after said elephant went wild and rampaged through the streets before being euthanized in 1902”, this is the answer. Aside from the elephant and the truly gorgeous Lebanon cedar tree in the courtyard, the museum has a lovely collection that reminded us of the National Gallery in London – not an overwhelming building, but a well-presented collection that draws you gently from beginning to end. It’s definitely worth a visit, particularly if you’ve been looking at castles and churches for a couple-few days and want a change of pace.

Museum accomplished, we sauntered back to Amboise and made for an early-ish dinner at L’Ambacia, a family/tourist-oriented brasserie where we saw a family of 6 feed all of the kids burgers while the adults had terrines of duck confit and the like. I gotta hand it to ’em, that’s full service. Maybe not the finest of fine dining you’ll ever experience, but horses for courses and all that. And with full bellies achieved, we made for our digs again, to pack and be ready for a day of da Vinci and travel. (Woo! Back on the teaser train!)

* Our dogs, for those of you who didn’t know us in the States.