Chambord and Cheverny

Sorry it has taken a bit of time to get to this.  It rained all weekend so it was hard to get down to it because I was feeling lazy.  And this morning the sun is out for the first time in about a week--fleeting as it may be--- and I have been out in the back garden trying to plant things.

But here I am again.  It was just over a week ago that Mary, Chuck and I woke up on a very rainy morning in Amboise and took off for two more chateaux, Chambord and Cheverny.

Chambord is one of the largest chateaux in the area.  It is huge, And absolutely gorgeous from the outside.

Francois the 1st--perhaps with the help of Leonardo Da Vinci-- designed it around a center staircase, which takes up a lot of the room.

Is is also very cold.  And we were soaking wet, so that did not help.  It's not as fully furnished as Chernonceaux  but it is still lush, in the rooms that are available for tourists to see.

Here is the King's bedroom, very big and not very cozy.  There was a smaller room right next door that he slept in on occasion.  (I would choose it every night).

As I said, the place is cavernous, with a lot of wasted space in the middle.  The story is that Francois the first would only stay here for four or five days at a time.  I can certainly understand that,  It's beautiful, but it's cold in both temperature and atmosphere.

There are pigeons living in the chapel...

and graffiti carved into many of the walls...very sad really.

By this time, Mary was at the cafe having a warm cup of tea to take the chill off.  Chuck and I decided to go up the staircase as far as we could and we were rewarded for our trouble.  Not only did you get a close-up view of the turrets of the building

but also the grounds.

As you can see from the picture above, one of the owners of the castle had a canal built to keep water away from  the chateaux.  A lot of this part of the country appears to be marshland and so there has been a lot of engineering to keep some of the land dry for building.

The lands around Chambord, which was used by the king and the subsequent owners as a hunting lodge, are supposedly bigger than the land mass of Paris proper.  But if there is a lesson to be learned it is that a beautiful design, even one with input from Da Vinci, does not a home make.

So we bid farewell to Chamborg and were on our way the Cheverny, which, unlike the other chateaux that we saw, is still lived in by the owners.  You could really tell--it was a lot warmer and more inviting.

But it was still very imposing from the outside.

This is the first room we see, the dining room.

Then it was on to the hall and the staircase with antlers that were apparently 6,000 years old and found either on the property or nearby.

To give you an idea of the big the antlers are--and the animal they came from...here's a picture of Mary below them.  The brochure says the antlers are hung at the level they would have been on the animal.

Then there is the birthing room, where a new mother would present her baby, I gather.  A very pretty room.

Then there was a child's room, with apparently one of the first hobby horses in existence.

And then this room, with a wedding gown worn by one of the former residents.

It was just a lovely place to live.

Still, I don't know if I could live someplace where the public was constantly walking in and out and hanging around the property.

One of the biggest draws of this particular chateaux is the 70 hunting hounds that are kept on the property and fed every day at 5PM,  They are very disciplined and wait patiently until the handler lets them at the food.

Here is what it looks like....

And here is the result.

These hounds are a lot larger than I imagined they would be.  If I were a fox, I'd be really scared to think they had picked up my scent.

Cheverny also has some lovely gardens.

Another lovely day in the Loire Valley.  Then it was back to Amboise.  W went out to dinner at a nice place called the Lion.