Chenonceau Chateau was contemporaneous with Chambord. Chambord was uncomfortable, impracticable, garish, overblown, and innovative. Chenonceau was comfortable, practicable, beautiful, and not particularly innovative. That’s probably because the original castle was built by one of the king’s main advisers, who obviously had more sense.

The castle was built at the site of a water mill. One of the later owners thought it would be cool to extend it across the river by building a bridge. Unlike the bridge in Avignon, this bridge goes all the way across the river. But there is no place to to on the other side of the river. Still, it’s a cool castle with a cool bridge.

A cool castle needs a cool chapel. This one is way cool. The original stain glass windows were destroyed during WW II. These were created in the 1950s. But it’s still way cool.

When can a castle owner add to put his chateau over the top? How about a basement spooky torture chamber? A first-rate wine cellar would be a lot better. Many thanks to Danita for finding this wine cellar while I was drinking coffee.

If you get to France and have time to visit just one chateau, make sure you see Chenonceau.

We had a lot of driving yesterday. It was 3 hours from our hotel to the chateau and another hour to our hotel in Tours. When we got to Tours, the street to our hotel was blocked because of the Tour de France bicycle race. So we had to cool our jets for another hour until that had passed.

The Chambord Chateau was a hunting lodge turned into an expression of a king’s super-size ego. It was built in an area of prime hunting, but not so good for fantastic castles. It was swampy, bug infested in the summer, and very cold in the winter. It was impossible to heat the huge rooms. The ceilings were so high that some rooms were split in half horizontally, with servants and storage upstairs and plenty of head room for all. Basic amenities such as wood floors were missing for most of the Chateau’s existence. It is easy to understand why none of the kings visited for very long or very often. One person did live here for a few years. He was a pretender to the throne and thought he could come back to be king of France in the 1800s. One wonders about the intelligence of the French royalty.

(Double Helix Staircase)

In spite of its overwhelming faults, it has a very interesting architecture. It is basically 4 cylinders arranged symmetrically around a very large, double-helix stair case. Unfortunately, they had to use a lot of stone to support the staircase, which hides its elegance. But you can see the double helix if you look closely. The French desperately want to credit the central idea for this layout to Leonardo da Vinci. There is no written documentation about the architect, and none of Leonardo’s notes mention working on this chateau, but they did come up with a clever morphing of the chateau into Leonardo’s spiral-helicopter drawing.

Here’s a detail from the forth-floor terrace.

Our visit to Rouffignac Cave made three caves, and each was entirely different. Lascaux was overwhelming from the moment we walked in, with artists even building scaffolding to paint the ceiling. Font de Gaume had art that was just as good as Lascaux, but only a few animals at a time, and faded. We were looking at the real, 15,000 year art and it was very impressive, but not overwhelming. Rouffignac started out a lot like Font de Gaume, but as we got into the cave it became more and more incredible. The art was still masterpieces. The guide pointed something I had missed before. It was impossible for the artists to erase a line. Every piece had to be created perfectly the first time. This means only highly trained and qualified artists worked in the caves.

The most impressive part of Rouffignac is an area called the great ceiling. When the drawings were created, the ceiling was about 3 feet above the floor. This means the artists had to crawl in on their bellies, then work laying on their back, with their face almost touching the ceiling. In spite of this, each of the 66 animals is perfectly drawn and perfectly proportioned. The French excavated the floor so we could stand in the room and look at the ceiling. But nobody in prehistoric times could see more than a small part of it at once. Archaeologists believe the room was painted by 5 to 7 artists, all working at more-or-less the same time. Getting to the room was so arduous that the artists would have required a support staff to bring lamps, supplies, etc. It blew me away.

We were on the first tour at Rouffignac, which gave us time to do the hike also. It is called “Three Rivers and Three Viaducts”. The hike was nice, but not nearly as nice as the description indicated. Still, we saw some pretty countryside, an archaeological site, and some other interesting things. It would be really cool if the viaduct below were a Roman Aqueduct converted for carrying electricity. But actually, it’s a railroad bridge built in 1891.

Our hotels are a study in contrasts between yesterday and today. Yesterday, we were in a B & B. The host’s house was several centuries old. We saw the stone wall inside our bedroom, as well as the massive beams holding the roof up. The room was highly decorated and felt very comfortable. We had to drive to get anywhere. This caused us to eat snacks from the grocery store for dinner. Restaurants in France don’t open before 7 PM. I don’t like driving in the dark in France. Tonight, we are staying at a very low cost but ultra-modern hotel. Everything possible was done to save construction costs. For example, the bathroom is on a raised floor to make running plumbing easier. There was no receptionist when we arrived, the front door was locked. We received our key through a dispensing machine outside the front door. There are a number of restaurants and fast food places an easy walk from our hotel.

We’ve spent the last two days looking at cave paintings and goofing off. Thursday we visited Lascaux. The Lascaux cave is closed to the public. Instead, the French built an exact duplicate for people to visit. Entering the cave was an overwhelming experience. The art is simply amazing. Animals look 3 dimensional. They show motion and spirit. The ceiling as well as the walls were painted. The artists built scaffolding and ladders to reach the ceiling. All this was done 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. There is no doubt these paintings were very important to the people who painted them, but we don’t know why they were important.

Our cave Friday was Font de Gaume. This is the only place in Europe where one can walk into a cave and see the original polychromatic paintings. The number of paintings is much less. The ceilings were not painted because they were not suitable. And the paintings were faded. But the quality of the art was on par with what we saw at Lascaux.

Today, we will leave our hotel and drive to Limoges. Along the way, we have an option to visit Rouffignac Cave, or take a hike, or if we are very lucky do both.

(View above St. Cirq, where we had lunch)

Yesterday we drove from Toulouse to Sarlat-la-Caneda, another popular medieval town, but we didn’t come here for that. There are three caves within a half-hour drive with 20,000 year old paintings. We’ll spend the next 3 days visiting caves and touring the area.

(Castle ruins)

The interesting part of our day yesterday was a stop in St. Cirq Lapopie. This is still another medieval town, built in the 13th century and rebuilt in the 15th. It is situated on the steep banks of the Lot River, making it a wonderfully picturesque village. As part of my informal hobby of eating lunch in amazing places, we had lunch at the castle ruins, with the panoramic view above.

(An art studio)

In addition to the church, restaurants, and gift shops, St. Cirq has an artist colony with several art studios.

The weather was perfect. The coffee was very good, and the views were spectacular.

We toured the medieval walled city of Carcassonne. It appears to be perfectly repaired in every way. It was much larger than I thought it would be. Carcassonne was protected by a moat, then an outer wall, then an inner wall. The castle was inside the city and was pretty well fortified just on its own.

The strange yellow markings are plastic stripes. They were placed on the wall by an artist in honor of some UNESCO event. They look hopelessly out of place, except from just one spot between the two walls.

Of course a city this impressive would have a cathedral. This church is still actively in use, but it lost it’s cathedral status in modern times.

When we were done at Carcassonne, we went to tour Toulouse. This time most of the driving was done on France’s excellent A-highways (interstates). Our little Renault did amazingly well tooling down the road at 130 KPH (about 80 MPH). We didn’t do a lot of touristing in Toulouse. Mostly, we didn’t want to spend a second night in that incredibly expensive hotel. We spent the night in a place similar to a Residence Inn. It’s downtown, which means parking is a mess. But we have two huge rooms. One has the bath and bedroom. The other has the living room, kitchen, and dining area. The two rooms are separated by a door, which makes it easier for Danita to catch a little more sleep after I get up.

We left Arles and drove a couple of hours to a sculpture hike. This hike is deep in the countryside near the town of Mayronnes. When we went through cities, we expected to encounter narrow streets. But even the country streets between towns are narrow. They don’t bother to post signs for one-lane bridges — it’s the norm.

Our car GPS had no idea where the hike started, but it knew where the city was. When we got close to the city, we switched to Google Maps on my phone and quickly found the hike. I’m glad we decided to rent a small economy car. A tank of gas costs $50 euro (about $60). We bought the gas at a car dealer. It makes sense to me that when in the countryside, a car dealer would sell cars, auto repairs, and gas. But we were surprised to find that one can also buy wine at the car dealer. I guess this is France.

It was a nice hike, and we saw over 30 statues, all made by local artists. The trail crossed a ridge to give a panoramic view of the town below. But the most interesting thing we saw is an artist working on his latest sculpture. His name is Bozo (pronounced beu-zo). He has done several other statues on this trail.

Our hotel is a special treat. We are staying in the fanciest hotel in Carcassonne, a walled medieval city which has been totally restored. It was very windy and cool last night, and we felt somewhat tired after our hike. We decided to borrow a DVD for the evening and go exploring tomorrow.

Yesterday was museum day. Museums are kind of boring, especially if you aren’t there in person. But we did see a couple of interesting things. Here’s a picture of a Roman barge, circa 50 AD. This is the real boat, recovered from the bottom of the river. The pole you can see doubled as a sail mast (when the wind could help) and a towing mast (when going up river).

Of course wooden boats need reinforcement for added strength. This barge used iron.

The other thing boats need is a good bilge pump.

This pic shows how the knots in the rope and the disks locked into a piece of sculpted wood arrangement to get a gear.

We had a lucky and interesting experience driving up to Arles. We were on a toll road. I didn’t recognize what the signs meant fast enough, and pulled into a lane reserved for some kind of automatic E-payment. If I did this in the US, I would drive through, the camera would record my license plate, I would receive a bill, and send a check. No big deal. That’s not how they do things in France. In France, there’s a gate. And that gate stays down until you present the E-payment device. If you don’t have the device, you will sit there for a very long time. But I was very lucky, because the driver in front of me made exactly the same mistake. The people behind me started backing up, obviously disgusted at the idiot who drove in the wrong lane. When it came my turn, I put on my best “disgusted at the idiot in front of me” face and backed up until I could get in the manual payment lane.

Today, we’re off to Carcassonne, a medieval town.