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.