There Was A House in Old Orleans: Southern France, Day 14

This trip to France has been the opposite of our most recent jaunt to Ireland. The pace has been what may best be described as “elegiac”. Breakfast whenever we’re ready for it, a beautiful attraction or two, dinner, and settle in. It’s actually kind of great and is definitely getting us away from the hectic pace we used to set for ourselves on our US-based vacations. This day, however, was going to be a throwback. We had to set an alarm; what the hell, I thought we were done with those! Still, with a little luck it would be worth it. We’re going to one of the truly iconic chateaus (I’m done copy-pasting the word “château” and I can’t get the ascii code to work; it’s going to come up about a thousand more times in this series soooooo yeah) in the entire Loire, and then heading to Orleans, about which I knew almost nothing except for a couple of hot spots to check out. We’re exploring parts of France never before seen (by the two of us) – allons-y!

Breakfast at Les Sources, as may have been mentioned, is surprisingly good. That said, this is day 14 of our trip and there’s no such thing as a truly appealing hotel petit dejuner (honh honh). Nevertheless, we break our fast happily enough and then hit the road. The itinerary for the day is a big loop (“circle” would be generous) with about three and a half hours of driving total but scattered between various sites. Our first stop is east, to Chateau de Sully-sur-Loire. The key word there is “sur”, which means “on”, and it is indeed on the river. Technically we think there are canals involved (the signs were in French, sue me) but the effect is still stunning, as you can see in the photo at the top.

Alas, the photo at the top is a stock image (dang those these can be spendy), because the drought of 2022 has played merry Hell with the Loire, and anything having to do with a spectacular water feature has been de-spec-tac…. spectacle… screwed. It’s been screwed. It was such a letdown that try as she might Lisa couldn’t take a photo worth showing to anyone; not because she didn’t try, i2I think I’ve said before Lisa is gracious about the little setbacks and is having a good time, but I’ve got nervous parent syndrome at this point and, to stretch a metaphor, my kid just peed his pants during his piano recital. We move on.

Our other stop for the day is in the city of Orleans. I thought I knew what to expect, but there have been several places so far on this trip that I had outsized expectations of based on hearing about the places for so long. Tours, for example, was about 1/5th the size of what I had been led to believe. So it was with some sense of relief that we approached the city and saw that it was, in fact… well, a city. There were two main objectives in the city: lunch, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts. After finding street parking, we tackled lunch first. We were walking towards one of two restaurants I had targeted, but as we approached it we found a massive swarm of construction that we’d have to squeeze through to reach it. Casting my eyes about I saw that my second target was actually only 100m away and on a clear path; and thus it was that we had lunch at BAROK bar brasserie. It was a fine meal from a pretty typical brasserie menu, but the people-watching was excellent. BAROK is on a large pedestrian plaza that features markets, plenty of open space, and a classic old two-story carousel. All in all, a pleasant way to refuel for the afternoon.

It was a short walk from there to the Musée des Beaux-Arts. It’s a tricky museum to describe blow-by-blow; there are several partial floors between “full” ones, but floor 1.5 (for example) was just as robust as 1 or 2. I dunno, it was odd. That said, we came away agreeing that we’d spent more tickets for much less interesting museums. For one thing, we could appreciate the curation. I promise, we don’t usually walk through museums pondering how it is curated, but that’s the point; we could see what they were trying to show us clearly. For example, there was a sequence of Madonna with Child images that clearly demonstrated the evolution of depicting the duo over the centuries. We could even, thanks to our day trip to the Donatello exhibition in Florence a few months ago, pinpoint the moment when the figures stopped acknowledging that they were being observed. There were numerous times in this museum where we’d stop and reflect on a particular exhibition. It’s absolutely worth a trip if you’re anywhere nearby.

The afternoon pleasantly passed, we finished our loop and returned to our hotel. There had been another possible stop I had sorted, to Fréjus, but it had been a back-up sort of thing and the day had gone by without it, so home we went. Dinner that night was as close to mediocre as we got on this trip; not bad, but not really worth a description or a recommendation. I only mention it because you may be used to hearing about the meals, and you aren’t. We popped back to Les Sources where we enjoyed the peace and quiet of the property for a long while before tucking in for the night.