A France Post
Jul. 28th, 2003 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darcydodoJuly 1, 2003
OK, very long day, and still no internet access. Well, there's access in town, but it's late, I'm tired, and hence the question is slightly irrelevant. So.
We left Amboise after antics with a small, sleepy child and a big friendly dog. The road we were taking out of town wove through back lanes and past Leonardo da Vinci's house (apparently), but we didn't stop. The path we're following is one given in a book of bike tours, but we're going backwards. ("Inventions marvellous Leonardo's," said my father, reading the guid book, "of models scale view.") I thought, on account of this, that it might be like trying to follow the Wychwood trail backwards, but apparently following well-paved roads in reverse is quite unlike barging blindly across open countryside. We only had one or two map-related incidents, and neither of those was entirely because of our inverted course. Maybe slightly, or at least more easily avoided.
Anyway, we aimed at first for Chenonceau, a château originally built for François I. (He must have been busy; he built Fontainebleau, too.) En route we passed Mini-Chateaux, an attraction featuring all the châteaux of the Loire region, predictably in miniature. It's labelled as a kids' thing, so of course I wanted to stop, but this didn't happen. We did, however, arrive intact and in good time at Chenonceau, and first we had fun with a hedge-maze (despite being quite easy, it was definitely a maze and hence made up for the uncertain one at Versailles). The château was very exciting, too. I only had an hour, so I didn't go see the museum-y bit, but that's OK, the château was worth it. 'Cos it had a kitchen. With lots of bright copper pots, and pumps, and fun kitcheny things like hanging spices. That was the great thing about Chenonceau; they'd decorated it with floral and planty thises and thats, perhaps as it might once have been. It also had very French-style ceilings (I can identify these, thanks to the Fontainebleau tour), and I managed to finally get my coveted picture of François I's golden salamander. I was, however, slightly disconcerted by the short-haired Sampson in several images.
We cycled off after this and took lunch at Luzillé. Brasserie sandwiches all around. While we were in lunch, the skies opened. Until then, they had been lovely; fresh and somewhat cloudy until Chenonceau, then warm and bright blue after this. But now it decided to show us what it could do if it tried. Well, by the time we headed off again, it had tempered to a very mild drizzle, but the roads were still wet. I don't know if it was due to this, or to a slanting wind, or because of the beer I had at lunch, or what, but not far from the town, my wheel skidded off the slightly mounded edge of the road, and I fell, hard. Skinned the heels of both hands and made my elbow bleed, despite being inside my jacket. A car was coming the other way just then, and it stopped, and some people got out. I tried telling them in French that my parents were here, it was OK, but they turned out to be English in any case, and quite jolly. The man suggested that it would help the pain if I swore a lot. Fortunately, I had some exceedingly large band-aids in my bag.
After recovering sufficiently from this little incident, I gingerly proceeded. We passed lots of fields of corn and wheat, and also some other sorts of grain. Probably barley or oats. Ther were also fields of sunflowers, so that occasionally the grain fields, instead of having poppies here and there, had stray sunflowers. The ditches were full of wildflowers: poppies, thistles, sea holly, spikenard (not sure about this one, it was definitely a spikey purple flower), and numerous others. The sea holly, which was very plentiful, puzzled me, for although it was clearly eryngium, there was no blue on it. And it wasn't Miss WIlmot's Ghost, either, because it wasn't silvery and the bracts weren't nearly long enough.
At one point, the skies broke open again, and we took shelter under some trees that just happened to be nearby. This is, you understand, not a common occurrence, so we were lucky. On the other hand, not so luckily, the road was changing here, and we weren't sure which way to go. Well, the signposting was clear, but my mother had written something else on her map. We went that direction, along a very busy highway, and didn't come to the road we were supposed to. Her map was, of course, wrong, but I saw what we could do to rectify the problem. I don't know what the "real" route would hav been like, but our eventual path led us through very agricultural country and eventually to Chédigny (where we would have ended up anyway), which was a gorgeous little town.
Between Chédigny and Loches, our eventual destination, nothing exciting happneed, but there was gorgeous countryside, with horses and wildflowers and rivers and old houses. Just at the edge of Beaulieu sur Loches, we stopped to figure out the route. It was bucketing down rain, again — the weather was being fairly schizophrenic. Hot blue skies or torrential rain. Anyway, I heard a cat, hissing, and assumed it was coming from the other side of the wall. But it soudned too close for this, and it coccasionally turned into a yowling screech, and I eventually went to investigate. Under the leaves of a blackberry bush was a very young orange kitten, undoubtedly feral. I didn't touch it; I figured it woul bite me. But I felt sorry for it, all alone in the rain. Anyway, we arrived in Loches, and our hotel was very nice. (I love having parents who will pay for things!) After baths for sore muscles (all of us) and bleeding hands (me), we wandered out to look for dinner.
This proved a bit of a task, as places were either boring or too expensive. Our own hotel had a nice menu, but it wasn't precisely on the cheap side, and there's something a bit passé about eating at one's hotel, I think. Anyway, we eventually decided that we would eat there regardless, but we'd check out one final place first, the restaurant at Hotel George Sand. This was very highly recommended by our biking book, but was also supposed to be quite expensive. It was a bit difficult to find the restaurant, but eventually we succeeded, after a bit of misdirection and the "I know how to get there!"s of my mother. It was situated right on the river and had a lovely view. The menus were expensive, it was true, but there was a €16 menu called "L'humeur du chef." Outside, it didn't detail of what this consisted. Anyway, we were tired and hungry and this looked like good fun regardless, so we went inside.
We sat right by the window, looking at the river and the willows and the steel girder spanning the water. There was, in fact, a set of choices even for the menu we were having, and it looked at least passable, even pretty exciting. In the end, I had a terrine of vegetables with a tomato and basil coulis, filet mignon of roast pork, and a salad with warm goat cheese for dessert. It was a fresh goat cheese, from the region, with ashes on the outside. They've had it at every restaurant we've been to, so far (yes, I'm writing this bit somewhat later, if you can't tell). The pork had the best thing with it — a mousse of carrots. Absolutely fantastic. Other things at the table (given my paretns' choices): a salad with slices of smoked goose and cantelope (for the appetizer), a dish of salmon and smoked chicken with taglietelle, and a crème brûlée with verbena (at first I thought it was vervain, 'cause the French is vervaine, but I discovered later that it actually wasn't). The flavor of the crème brûlée was lovely, given the verbena (which I've rarely tasted, if ever), but I'm stupidly, or at least annoyingly, fussy about crèmes brûlées and it didn't meet my standards. Which isn't to say I wouldn't eat any! The wine was a red from Bourgueil; I tried to get the 1997 cuvée vignes vieilles, but they were out, so they brought me something else from the same year and region that was incredibly nice.
After this we went back to the hotel and went to sleep, me sadly nursing my hands.
OK, very long day, and still no internet access. Well, there's access in town, but it's late, I'm tired, and hence the question is slightly irrelevant. So.
We left Amboise after antics with a small, sleepy child and a big friendly dog. The road we were taking out of town wove through back lanes and past Leonardo da Vinci's house (apparently), but we didn't stop. The path we're following is one given in a book of bike tours, but we're going backwards. ("Inventions marvellous Leonardo's," said my father, reading the guid book, "of models scale view.") I thought, on account of this, that it might be like trying to follow the Wychwood trail backwards, but apparently following well-paved roads in reverse is quite unlike barging blindly across open countryside. We only had one or two map-related incidents, and neither of those was entirely because of our inverted course. Maybe slightly, or at least more easily avoided.
Anyway, we aimed at first for Chenonceau, a château originally built for François I. (He must have been busy; he built Fontainebleau, too.) En route we passed Mini-Chateaux, an attraction featuring all the châteaux of the Loire region, predictably in miniature. It's labelled as a kids' thing, so of course I wanted to stop, but this didn't happen. We did, however, arrive intact and in good time at Chenonceau, and first we had fun with a hedge-maze (despite being quite easy, it was definitely a maze and hence made up for the uncertain one at Versailles). The château was very exciting, too. I only had an hour, so I didn't go see the museum-y bit, but that's OK, the château was worth it. 'Cos it had a kitchen. With lots of bright copper pots, and pumps, and fun kitcheny things like hanging spices. That was the great thing about Chenonceau; they'd decorated it with floral and planty thises and thats, perhaps as it might once have been. It also had very French-style ceilings (I can identify these, thanks to the Fontainebleau tour), and I managed to finally get my coveted picture of François I's golden salamander. I was, however, slightly disconcerted by the short-haired Sampson in several images.
We cycled off after this and took lunch at Luzillé. Brasserie sandwiches all around. While we were in lunch, the skies opened. Until then, they had been lovely; fresh and somewhat cloudy until Chenonceau, then warm and bright blue after this. But now it decided to show us what it could do if it tried. Well, by the time we headed off again, it had tempered to a very mild drizzle, but the roads were still wet. I don't know if it was due to this, or to a slanting wind, or because of the beer I had at lunch, or what, but not far from the town, my wheel skidded off the slightly mounded edge of the road, and I fell, hard. Skinned the heels of both hands and made my elbow bleed, despite being inside my jacket. A car was coming the other way just then, and it stopped, and some people got out. I tried telling them in French that my parents were here, it was OK, but they turned out to be English in any case, and quite jolly. The man suggested that it would help the pain if I swore a lot. Fortunately, I had some exceedingly large band-aids in my bag.
After recovering sufficiently from this little incident, I gingerly proceeded. We passed lots of fields of corn and wheat, and also some other sorts of grain. Probably barley or oats. Ther were also fields of sunflowers, so that occasionally the grain fields, instead of having poppies here and there, had stray sunflowers. The ditches were full of wildflowers: poppies, thistles, sea holly, spikenard (not sure about this one, it was definitely a spikey purple flower), and numerous others. The sea holly, which was very plentiful, puzzled me, for although it was clearly eryngium, there was no blue on it. And it wasn't Miss WIlmot's Ghost, either, because it wasn't silvery and the bracts weren't nearly long enough.
At one point, the skies broke open again, and we took shelter under some trees that just happened to be nearby. This is, you understand, not a common occurrence, so we were lucky. On the other hand, not so luckily, the road was changing here, and we weren't sure which way to go. Well, the signposting was clear, but my mother had written something else on her map. We went that direction, along a very busy highway, and didn't come to the road we were supposed to. Her map was, of course, wrong, but I saw what we could do to rectify the problem. I don't know what the "real" route would hav been like, but our eventual path led us through very agricultural country and eventually to Chédigny (where we would have ended up anyway), which was a gorgeous little town.
Between Chédigny and Loches, our eventual destination, nothing exciting happneed, but there was gorgeous countryside, with horses and wildflowers and rivers and old houses. Just at the edge of Beaulieu sur Loches, we stopped to figure out the route. It was bucketing down rain, again — the weather was being fairly schizophrenic. Hot blue skies or torrential rain. Anyway, I heard a cat, hissing, and assumed it was coming from the other side of the wall. But it soudned too close for this, and it coccasionally turned into a yowling screech, and I eventually went to investigate. Under the leaves of a blackberry bush was a very young orange kitten, undoubtedly feral. I didn't touch it; I figured it woul bite me. But I felt sorry for it, all alone in the rain. Anyway, we arrived in Loches, and our hotel was very nice. (I love having parents who will pay for things!) After baths for sore muscles (all of us) and bleeding hands (me), we wandered out to look for dinner.
This proved a bit of a task, as places were either boring or too expensive. Our own hotel had a nice menu, but it wasn't precisely on the cheap side, and there's something a bit passé about eating at one's hotel, I think. Anyway, we eventually decided that we would eat there regardless, but we'd check out one final place first, the restaurant at Hotel George Sand. This was very highly recommended by our biking book, but was also supposed to be quite expensive. It was a bit difficult to find the restaurant, but eventually we succeeded, after a bit of misdirection and the "I know how to get there!"s of my mother. It was situated right on the river and had a lovely view. The menus were expensive, it was true, but there was a €16 menu called "L'humeur du chef." Outside, it didn't detail of what this consisted. Anyway, we were tired and hungry and this looked like good fun regardless, so we went inside.
We sat right by the window, looking at the river and the willows and the steel girder spanning the water. There was, in fact, a set of choices even for the menu we were having, and it looked at least passable, even pretty exciting. In the end, I had a terrine of vegetables with a tomato and basil coulis, filet mignon of roast pork, and a salad with warm goat cheese for dessert. It was a fresh goat cheese, from the region, with ashes on the outside. They've had it at every restaurant we've been to, so far (yes, I'm writing this bit somewhat later, if you can't tell). The pork had the best thing with it — a mousse of carrots. Absolutely fantastic. Other things at the table (given my paretns' choices): a salad with slices of smoked goose and cantelope (for the appetizer), a dish of salmon and smoked chicken with taglietelle, and a crème brûlée with verbena (at first I thought it was vervain, 'cause the French is vervaine, but I discovered later that it actually wasn't). The flavor of the crème brûlée was lovely, given the verbena (which I've rarely tasted, if ever), but I'm stupidly, or at least annoyingly, fussy about crèmes brûlées and it didn't meet my standards. Which isn't to say I wouldn't eat any! The wine was a red from Bourgueil; I tried to get the 1997 cuvée vignes vieilles, but they were out, so they brought me something else from the same year and region that was incredibly nice.
After this we went back to the hotel and went to sleep, me sadly nursing my hands.
