We started our day at the Eiffel Tower. We got there shortly after they opened, but the lines were already long. I didn’t realize they have two lines for buying tickets. One line gets to ride the elevator all the way up. The other has to climb the stairs the first 2/3 of the way. I wanted to ride the elevator. We ended up taking the stairs. The line taking the stairs was shorter, and we made it up the steps, but I would have preferred the elevator. I didn’t get a good pic of the outside of the tower, and it was still a little foggy from last night’s rain. Here’s a pic of the wooden “conductor” who sits at the bottom of the elevator with his fake control panel. The elevator is quite large and two stories tall. I thought our line was long, but as we came down we saw the lines were much longer.

Another Paris icon is the Louvre. Our visit focused on French painters. There are no French Impressionist paintings in France’s most famous art museum. We also stopped to see the Mona Lisa. We saw Leonardo’s famous painting, but from 15 or 20 meters away. There was a large crowd pushing to get close to the painting. If there was a line, it was quite disorganized. The view was further compromised by selfie sticks. Smart phones were pushing above the crowd like weeds popping out of the ground in the spring. You can find your own picture of this famous painting on the internet. Here’s a picture of “Winged Victory” — a little less well known, but much easier to see. We saw a lot of tired, zoned out people. Below is a picture of the courtyard, including I. M. Pei’s pyramids.

We went back to the room for a short rest, then went to a concert at Saint Chapelle. This was my first visit to Saint Chapelle, as well as Danita’s. My initial impression was of an unusually striking stone church sanctuary, but without the side vaults and Greek Cross layout. After a minute, I realized the entire wall is stained glass all the way around the sanctuary. It’s not just that there is so much stained glass. It’s that it seems there  can’t possibly be enough stone between the windows to support the ceiling, or even all that stained glass, and it would be impossible to even install one window as tall and as heavy as these windows are. This is the most amazing stone church I have visited.

The concert was unusual but good. It was a 6-piece orchestra, 5 strings and a harpsichord. We heard Vivaldi’s 4-seasons twice. I call it Vivaldi’s 8 seasons. The second pass included lots of different styles and musical jokes. The music was always impossibly fast and impeccably played. I would have thought the acoustics of a large stone-and-glass sanctuary would be too live for music like this, but the echo was quite muted. No doubt the large number of people in the audience helped. I also heard some interesting resonances in the lower musical registers.

According to the tour book, tourists should visit one of the little towns that surround Paris. We took the train to Chartres, about 60 miles southeast of Paris. On the train trip down, we were surprised to see a lot of countryside and farms between Paris and Chartres. This little town has three major churches. The newest on the left is 15th century, but the first church at this site dates back to the 4th century. The oldest on the right is 11th century, and used to be a Benedictine monastery.

Chartes has an active stained glass community. Their workshop doubles as a stained glass museum. The piece above shows St. Michael fighting off the forces of evil. It struck my fancy because the man in the lower right looks for all the world like a little boy who got a boo-boo on his finger. We saw a large number of historic pieces, mostly after 1540, but some going back to 1000 AD. The basement of the museum has a large gallery of modern pieces made by the local artisans.

Chartres is known for their evening illumination. We ran out of things to see, so we found a quiet bench and opened our E-readers. Chartres has some kind of projected light show, which starts at 9. The last train back to Paris leaves at 9:30. We weren’t going to see the show. Along the way, we saw several houses with projections of locals who were important to local history.

An alert reader will notice there are only two churches shown illuminated. We did not see the center church last night. We were standing at the furthest church when a lightening storm started rolling in. We took a quick pic and took hi-tailed it back to the train station. The shortest route didn’t include the middle church. We were still a block from the train station when the rain started in earnest.  Fortunately, we made it back in time to catch an earlier train. Unfortunately, the earlier train was significantly delayed. We ended up waiting at the train station for the 9:30 train.

We obviously missed a lot of history and many interesting stories. But we had a delightful time none the less.

Yesterday was a travel day. Hotel to rental car drop at (the first) Tours train station … to (the other) train station … to Paris … to Hotel. When we arrived in Paris, it was immediately obvious that driving here is another level from driving in the rest of France. The hotel in Paris is a disappointment. The room I envisioned when reading the description is significantly different than the room we have. But things are reasonably clean. The room will suffice.

After we got moved into our hotel, we had a couple of hours before dinner. The Catacombs was right down the street, so we visited that. It is the definition of macabre.

(Clos Lyce, Da Vinci’s last home)

This is our last day in Tours. We visited the official Royal Chateaux (Chateaux Royal d’Amboise). Other than being the king’s official castle, it wasn’t anything super special. WE visited because it is next door to Clos Lyce, the house where Leonardo Da Vinci spent the last years of his life. The king of France was looking to make himself grander. He figured a good way to do that was to have the acknowledged #1 genius of the Western World come live with him. Da Vinci didn’t do anything important in the last years of his life. But he had fun making some special effects for royal celebrations and such.

They had models of many of DaVici’s inventions, including his famous helical helicopter.

Many of DaVinci’s inventions were so futuristic that they were simply fantasies. Others were more practical, but didn’t have the materials required for practical implantation. But many of his inventions were practical then and now, such as the above parabolic bridge. This one is both practical and beautiful. Both the house and the garden were filled with Da Vinci models, and even a few audio clips. Unfortunately, the audio clips made Da Vinci sound more like a space cadet than a genius. Anyway, it was great good fun to walk around.

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.