When Lynda and I discussed what we wanted to do on our trip, the only things she wanted to do was see a castle, do a wine tasting and go to the Louvre.

Thursday, October 24th would check off two of those as we are going on a castle tour with a wine tasting at the 2nd castle in the Loire Valley. (Spoiler alert; we never did get into the Louvre.)

It was an early start as we had to be at Les Catacombes de Paris for 7:00 am to catch the bus and it was a half hour or so walk to get there.

The bus was a bit over half full as we headed south for almost 3 hours to reach Château de Chambord.

The tour description says you get 75 minutes to explore Château de Chambord and grounds but that time goes by really fast. If we didn’t have a 20 minute pit stop at a gas station along the way, it would have been nice to add the time to the stop. (Like we were told would happen.)

According to Wikipedia; “The Château de Chambord in Chambord, Centre-Val de Loire, France, is one of the most recognisable châteaux in the world because of its very distinctive French Renaissance architecture, which blends traditional French medieval forms with classical Renaissance structures. The building was constructed by the king of France, Francis I.

Chambord is the largest château in the Loire Valley; it was built to serve as a hunting lodge for Francis I, who maintained his royal residences at the Château de Blois and Amboise. The original design of the château is attributed to the Tuscan architect Domenico da Cortona; Leonardo da Vinci may have also influenced the design.

The château features 440 rooms, 282 fireplaces, and 84 staircases. Four rectangular vaulted hallways on each floor form a cross-shape.”

I can tell you that it is a pretty impressive structure.

It probably took us about 20 minutes or so just to get inside to look around.

We walked up the really cool staircase to the top floor to overlook the grounds and castle itself.

Apparently, before WWII, a bunch of the art collections from the Louvre, including the Mona Lisa were stored at the Chateau. We were told there is a replica Mona Lisa still at the castle but we didn’t take the time to try and find her.

@spookie_bugz posed for me on top of the parapet.

It seemed like we barely had time to walk around the upper level before we had to head back down the stairs so we could start getting back to the bus.

Our guides had told us that Château de Chambord was the inspiration for the castle from Beauty and The Beast.

We were back on the bus, heading to “Enjoy free time for lunch in the quaint town of Blois,” according to our itinerary. It also states that it’s a 2 hour time slot.

There was a lot of blah, blah, blah from our two guides about the town of Blois and where they’d recommend to have lunch as we walked as a group from where the bus parked towards the restaurants.

Yeah, we picked the same spot they were having lunch and even though the place was busy, service was not exactly slow and we still barely had time to get lunch and pay the bill (had to track them down to pay it) before we had to rush back to the bus. So there was zero time to actually explore any part of the quaint town. Lunch itself was quite tasty so no disappointment there.

The downside of going down all these stairs for food, was having to climb back up.

This square between the bus and food amounted to the sum of our “exploring” in Blois.

It was about a 45 minute drive to our next stop; The Château de Chenonceau.

Which, according to Wikipedia is “a French château spanning the river Cher, near the small village of Chenonceaux, Indre-et-Loire, Centre-Val de Loire. It is one of the best-known châteaux of the Loire Valley.

The current château was built in 1514–1522 on the foundations of an old mill and was later extended to span the river. The bridge over the river was built (1556–1559) to designs by the French Renaissance architect Philibert de l’Orme, and the gallery on the bridge, built from 1570 to 1576 to designs by Jean Bullant.”

It was quite a walk from the bus to the “cave” we were to have the wine tasting in.

The wine tasting consisted of a rosé, a white and a red, in that order. While I am not much of a wine drinker, I found the taste of the wine got worse and worse as we went along. I suspect that part of that was us having to use the same glass for each wine. The rose wasn’t terrible but the white wasn’t good in my opinion and the red was terrible. Lucille even grabbed one of the extra rosé glasses to get the taste of the red out of her mouth. I’ve never been to a wine tasting before but it would make sense to me to have a clean glass per flavour to make it easier to tell them apart. Another thing I noticed is while we got a splash of wine to try, our guides got full glasses. If I had actually enjoyed it, I would have been a bit pissed off at that instead of just annoyed that I saw that.

We headed outside to check out the castle and try to get the taste out of our mouth.

While @spookie_bugz looked a bit out of place, he looked good posing along the river.

We ventured inside while we had some time. I wanted to try a panorama of the windows in the chapel, but it didn’t work out so I’ll just put a couple of the shots here.

The bedrooms were pretty clourful with a lot of different patterns.

Our guides seemed quite enamoured with the flower arrangements but I suspect the wine had something to do with that as they didn’t seem all that special to me.

We headed back outside as it was getting to be time to start heading back to the bus. I took a few photos of interesting stuff on the grounds but I totally forgot to take a photo of the bus like I had planned.

Soon we were back on the bus for the 3ish hour trek north to Paris. I saw a few interesting things on the drive but didn’t bother to try and get any photos through the window.

We got back to The Catacombs a little after 8:00 pm and started walking in the general direction of the apartment looking for food.

We stopped at Café d’Orléans on Av. du Général Leclerc for a decent meal before wandering back to the apartment.

Even with spending 6 hours on a bus, still managed to get over 15 and a half thousand steps today. Not too shabby all in all.

I wish I could say the same about the tour. I liked what we saw and the drive was good but what they sell by description and what you actually get don’t exactly jive and that part was disappointing.