Let’s just get one thing out of the way right now: nobody’s payin’ us nothin’ for nothin’. (Ok, that should have scared off the English majors, let’s the rest of us have some fun.) We’re about to spend basically the whole post talking about the hotel we stayed at, and they have no idea we’re doing it. It’s not that we want them to comp us anything, we just were genuinely taken with the place. There are several reasons, but the biggest is Gardener’s World on the BBC. (Pause for whiplash.) Like a lot of people in the lockdown, we were very attracted to soothing entertainment, and Monty Don and company talking about gardening as they follow the cycle of the year was just fabulous. We watched for a couple of years, although we’ve kind of lost the habit now that we live with *zero* garden and don’t anticipate one any time soon. While we came away with piles of practical tips for our own gardening, we were even more fascinated with the tours to majestic country gardens and explorations of specialized techniques for fancy people and fancy gardens. Then, totally by surprise, we lived in the middle of a fancy garden for several days.

Oh. We’re taking the time to share this now because we did nothing today. Zip. Diddly. A scheduled down day to relax and recharge. Worked like a charm. Anyway.

The premise is pretty simple: create a garden that requires almost no maintenance. Sure, easy, except for part 2 of the premise: it still needs to look good. Ahhhhhh here’s where the expertise comes in. If the garden isn’t going to be meticulously maintained, and you aren’t going to swap plants out every few weeks to maximize the visual impact, then the first thing that gets chucked over the side is flowers. I mean sure, there will be some, but if you aren’t there in the weeks when they bloom, tough poop, no flowers for you. Instead, visual interest has to come from texture and structure, as well as subtle differences in the palette of green that is deployed. Flowering plants that, when they lose their petals, leave behind an interesting bulb, seed head etc… are particularly valuable.

Whatever they paid the people who put this place together, it probably wasn’t enough. I mean, sure, maybe there are people in this world who move from one place to another that are all like this, but it sure seemed special to us. Everything coordinated but not in a matchy-matchy way; the walls of the buildings served as a canvas to better display the myriad light colors washing through the grounds. The plants they used created natural levels so that everything had its own stage. And since it all happened organically (I mean, we’re not idiots, we know a lot of care goes into a place like this, but it must be subtle) the place whole thing managed to maintain a completely rural and remote atmosphere while in actuality being a quite elaborate hotel, with pretty much every amenity under the sun up to and including bikes to peddle your way into Cheverny if you’d like.

Much like the day itself, there’s no clever button on the end of the post. We spent the day being cozy, and wandered the property a bit, and now you have, too.

We begin our day at our new hotel with breakfast. No crap, really? But this is actually reporting because the breakfast was pretty good. Yes, that’s a low bar, but breakfast buffets in hotels are the definition of “low bar”. Here, there was a wide choice of freshly cut up fruit for a salad (strawberry, kiwi, multiple melons, pineapple, cantaloupe), almost as many dried fruit options, cheese and meat options that were identical to what you would get on a charcuterie board later in the day… artisanal yogurts, house-made vanilla and chocolate cremes (which I don’t know what those are doing at breakfast, but yay!), along with a lot of the expected things. Also, you might be surprised how average the pastry can be at a French hotel’s buffet, but these folks actually get the good stuff, and man oh man “the good stuff” coming out of a French patisserie is *chef’s kiss*. What a lovely way to start the day. Bellies sated, we hit the road.

Our target for today is le Château de Chambord, which is the preeminent château in the Loire. It is basically the transitional fossil between the “château” which is often castle-like, and the out-and-out “castle”. On the fancy-large-house continuum the only thing more to the right than Chambord would be Versailles, followed by the Louvre. It big. It very big. As the story goes, Francis I was hunting in this marshy portion of the Loire valley and decided it would be an ideal location for the ultimate expression of royal puissance. Yes, in a marsh. If scenes from Monty Python are occurring to you, you are not the first I promise you. As far as we could tell from the various stories and instructional films, if the place was left alone for more than a fortnight it would begin to crumble.

Chambord is what happens if France-Land from Epcot Center was to secede and form its own theme park. First you enter the domain of Chambord, whence you will see signposts warning you that Pumbaa and Bambi have free run of the place. (Seriously, the signs say that deer and boar roam freely, and you have to avoid hitting them.) Then you are directed to one of several pay parking lots. As you begin your trek towards the ticket office, you can’t really see what’s going on inside yet, but you can get a peek of the majestic towers of the actual castle. Paying for your tickets in the a gift shop (natch) you are finally able to enter… the food court. I mean really, these people are on their game. This being France-Land of course, the food court is a bistro and a brasserie and a cafe gastronomique, so you have options, all of which are real food. This is also where you can rent a golf cart for you and your companions, since there is quite a lot of territory to cover. Feeling the pinch a little? Well, there’s a budget option for bicycles (but also a deluxe, e-bike package) that will get you around almost as well.

Now, the transport options might be giving you pause. Yes, the Chambord grounds are huge. The enclosing wall is 34 kilometers long. (As per usual, when a king wants to hunt somewhere that territory immediately becomes verboten to the local populace.) There’s a water feature – which we did not photograph because in the middle of this drought it’s more of a water disappointment – multiple gardens, and a field they’ve set aside for the jousting and bird of prey show. Yes, that’s right; this is apparently where Ren Faire people go in the off-season. The main attraction is, naturally, the castle itself. Like so many of these places it was built in many sections over time. This happens for a variety of reasons, but my favorite version of this story is that the original castle was conceived with no special apartment for the king – he and all of his other visiting nobles would be equal spaces. This is because, at the time of the design – stories of the Knights of the Round Table and their egalitarian nature (I mean, egalitarian as long as you were one of the knights, let’s not go crazy) held tremendous sway in the minds of the nobility. No sooner was the place built, however, then the king took one look at the equal apartments and said “bugger that” and had a whole new wing built for his personal chambers. In fact, the place wasn’t even finished, and the lovely symmetry that was a key feature of the place was knocked out of whack to account for a passage to the new wing. But hey, kings gonna king.

Within the castle itself, the most famous feature is the spiral staircase in the middle of it. More to the point, the double spiral staircase in the middle. There are two entrances to the stairs on every level, and the width and depth of the stairways is such that while it looks from the outside like it’s a single staircase, there are in fact two intertwined paths spiraling around a central core. There are multiple stories about why this was built. The first is that it allowed for a dignified path that allowed for various of the ennobled to encounter one another without actually getting in each other’s way. Another is that it allowed for the discreet movement of illicit lovers throughout the castle. (A lot of people love this story, but really now – you’re flipping a coin that you’ve chosen the path that will bypass whoever it is you’re hiding from. That’s not good odds on such a treacherous endeavor. But what do I know, being all non-ennobled and all…?) The theory I like goes to the architect of the central building. None is listed. Like, anywhere. There’s no official record of who designed the place. However, as you may recall from our post on Clos Luce, Leonard de Vinci (that’s the French version of his name, in case it’s causing you to tweak) had been invited into the service of Francis I. The completely symmetrical design of the place echoes many of the principles that Leonard’s work had displayed in his final days, and such a staircase would probably tickle him as well. Lacking firm evidence, we can only speculate. (Actually, everyone speculates.) It is a neat staircase, anyway.

Aside from the architectural curiosities, what the castle is, is a museum mostly of clothing, furniture and household goods. To their best ability they have tried to furnish the place in period pieces and have rolled back some of the more questionable remodeling decisions that have been visited upon the place over the years. As I said earlier, if the place was out of sight for more than a week or two it started to fall apart, and there were much longer periods where it was out of fashion. (Reason 1: constant mosquitos in summer. Reason 2: hard to heat in winter. Reason 3: Versailles) As a result, it went through numerous restorations. Hell, it’s going through one right now, that’s why the spires are all shrouded in scaffolding in our pictures. I give them credit for taking the time to get it right, but we both start to cringe at the sight of scaffolding. Alas, a reason to visit again when it’s finished.

We had a meal at… one of the places on site, I honestly forget what it was called. It was the one on the left? Good meal though, Lisa feels pretty sure that they are actual independent concerns that are simply renting space in the park, as opposed to wholly-owned feed troughs, which would explain why they still seemed to care about what they fed us. (I have thoughts.) Following a meal we made our way back to the hotel for a quiet evening of light fare from the hotel and an early night to bed. The next day would be the closest thing we’d have to a big day on this trip, with several hours on the road and multiple stops. You know what just happened.

Trivia time! Where did Leonardo da Vinci die? Was it a) a midair helicopter collision, b) in a hayfield, sliced in half by his own invention the horse-propelled scythe scissors, or c) in bed at le Château du Clos Lucé in Amboise, France? Take your time, I can be subtle and devious with my misdirecti- C, you say? That was fast. Well yes, party pooper, he died in 1519 in Amboise, having been the revered guest of King Francis I for several years prior to that. Despite being at the end of his life, his output in Lucé was prodigious even if much of it remained conceptual. We had a chance to learn all about this, and see some fascinating exhibitions, during our visit to Clos Luce on our way out of town.

Allons-y!

Le Château du Clos Lucé is mere minutes away from the center of town and royal Chateau of Amboise; this is not an accident. When Charles I “invited” Leonard to ply his trade in France, he made a gift of the nearby manor house for a residence and workshop. It was here that Lenny spent the final years of his life, continuing his work on water (for a treatise that never came together in time for publication before his death) and laboring on assigned tasks such as the never-built palace “Romorantin”, a sort of uber-planned community that was very sketchily begun before Charles set it aside in favor of a more cost-effective project in Chambord. If you know what Chambord is you are probably chuckling in bemused startlement that it could be considered cost-effective. If you don’t know, well, we’ve got you covered in our next post. (Woo! Teasers coming before the end of the post now!)

Whatever le Château du Clos Lucé was, what it is now is a strange, quasi-theme park on the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci. As weird as this sounds, it was surprisingly effective. Put it this way: we’ve been to a lot of exhibitions that did much worse jobs of trying to illustrate and give context to an artist’s output. (The new Picasso Museum in Paris comes to mind.) First of all, in the chateau itself are exhibits of the rooms he made use of – fine, ok. The furnishings may or may not be authentically his but are at least period-correct. Samples of his writing and work are somewhat amusing copies; having replicas of his notes in the study is one thing, having the Mona Lisa in the dining room is quite another. On the other hand, there was a small space with period furnishings, set behind a glass wall, that projected an astonishingly-good 3D scene of two actors portraying Leonard and his servant in conversation. Like, cutting edge stuff. Don’t be surprised if da Vinci headlines next year’s Coachella.

The basement of the chateau is given over to some really fantastic exhibits on some of his more famous designs, such as the “tank” which truly is a genius-level piece of evil engineering, topped only by the scissoring-scythes that were powered, and pushed forward, by a team of horses hitched to a framework behind (natch) the blades. Picture it – a pair of stallions racing forward with a rider atop one of them, only instead of it being a cart before these horses it’s a pair of giant scythes, oriented horizontally, and scissoring back and forth as they are shoved toward you at great speed. Ye gods and little fishes. One of the reasons we are so high on these exhibits is because they’ve done some very clever animations that show exploded diagrams of each device, then piece the design together in a way that demonstrates how it all goes together, and then shows it in action. The polish on these things isn’t Industrial Light & Magic or anything, but it’s competent work and well thought out.

On the spacious 35 acre grounds of the chateau, they have built models of his designs, and even practical examples of some of the more-thought-out concepts like his bridges. (His self-powered glider plane looks like something out of a South Park episode involving self-propelled unicycle cars. IYKYK.) Then there are (at least) two different exhibition spaces. One of them is the museum, featuring more models of his architectural work and copies of his notes on same; additionally, they have a space to show Leonard’s visual arts work, e.g., paintings and sketches. The trick is, they don’t own any of these things. So, instead, they’ve designed a variant of those artist immersive experiences that had been all the rage a little while ago. I must admit that we got irritated at what we got for our thirty bucks (or whatever it was) when we went to see one of them, but as a throw-in on our admission fee at Lucé it was a lovely diversion and exploration of his work. It was particularly effective how images of some of his sketches would appear, and then overlain with one of his finished works to show how they were instrumental in working out how to create the final piece. Once again, the curation of Clos Luce is really top notch.

So, as I said, they don’t actually own any of da Vinci’s work. However, they apparently have developed good enough relationships to borrow things occasionally, and while we were there they had the Vatican-held, and unfinished, “Saint Jerome”, which they displayed with a sampling of other works to put his in context, and then the piece itself, all by itself, in a large otherwise-empty space. It was nice to be able to spend quality time with the work in relative quiet – three cheers for the shoulder season!

With the exhibitions examined and the gardens explored, it was time for us to move on. We were already checked out of our accommodation in Amboise and so we hit the road directly, heading for Cheverny. There, we made camp at a simply amazing place called Les Sources de Cheverny. It is worthy of more description than ought to be here at the end of a long-ish post, and so we’ll pick up with that next time. DOUBLE TEASER. But, descriptions of hotels aside, we did still have a lovely dinner that night at a spot called Le Rendez-vous des Gourmets, a deceptively simple looking spot just a few minutes down the road. We were having second thoughts when we walked in, compounded by the fact that you can see into the kitchen from the entryway and the chef at work looks like your uncle. My uncle. Everybody’s uncle. Polo shirt, jeans, glasses, salt-and-pepper hair. He gave us a smile and a wave as we walked in. Hrm.

Turns out, Uncle Billy can cook. Lisa chowed down on pike fish … cake-salad thing, followed by chicken paired with sweetbreads (don’t look at me, she’s the zombie), while I had a pea velouté (soup) with salmon tartare, followed by a hard-to-describe concoction of, basically, thinly sliced and perfectly prepared beef. All of it delivered with exquisite presentation. I’ll never doubt the cooking of my parents’ brothers ever again. Happily sated, we made for our new digs and burrowed into the blankets, thus to prepare for another day out.