The chateau at Langelais....with a tiny Tom in the garden....
We got ourselves up and out the door to be at the chateau for our daytime visit first thing. We had taken the tour before, but this time the audio guide was much more thorough. It seems that technology is really making an impact, making our visits more enjoyable. We find that we can follow French tours, but we do miss a lot of detail. Some of the chateuax, though none we visited this time, now advertise that you can buy an audio guide for your ipod, in 22 languages. Maybe next time.
After our chateau tour, we left for Tours, which is an important for, among other things, a tower built by Charlemagne. Again, Tom found his way to the center of town (OK, so I do a lot of navigation, and the car does have GPS, but he still has to make the instantaneous driving decisions), and a parking space which happened to be next to a marketplace. So, we got out our picnic knife, bought a baguette and some pate, and had ourselves a delicious lunch for about $3 – trying to even out the overpriced beef the night before!
We walked around a bit, found a nice church, but decided to take our leave and drive by the tower on the way out of town. We headed for the chateau at Langeais, stopping for tea and coffee at a shop across the street before going inside.
It ended up that we had our own private English tour of the castle, which was excellent. We learned a lot about the castle itself, and the history of the area and castle life in general. Why did they hunt as they did? To practice skills needed for war. Why did they have so many trunks? Because every time the court moved around (and it purportedly moved every two weeks) it took all of the furniture – all of it – with it to the next stop. There was also a special exhibit of middle ages clothing which I had wanted to see but had been scheduled to close a week before, but it turned out that it had been held over. Tom was pleased since it was held in the attic of the castle, so he was able to see some of the interior structure of the roof of the castle.
Feeling a bit tired, we got a slice of terrine at a chacuterie and a baguette at a boulangerie, and went back to our hotel for a simple and delicious dinner.
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