"I want adventure in the great wide somewhere..."

I had the most wonderful day yesterday - I think it was my favorite day I've had in France thus far. On Thursday, Anna, Meredith, and I decided on a whim that we were going to rent a car and drive to the Loire Valley to find the Sleeping Beauty castle.
The "adventure" part of our day started almost immediately, when we picked up our rental car (we got a cute little blue Peugeot) and almost got lost trying to get out of Paris. There are several problems with driving in Paris: (1) there are hardly any street signs, so you have no indication of what street you're on, and you don't know where to turn; (2) it's tricky trying to figure out where to stop for the street lights; and (3) there are roundabouts EVERYWHERE, which would be okay except for people don't actually follow the rules of the roundabouts and they just kind of drive wherever they want to. Eventually, we made it to the freeway (l'autoroute in French) and after that, it was basically a straight shot from there.


The Château d’Ussé is kind of off the beaten path - that is to say that once we got off of the freeway, we had to drive down some really small, winding country roads for a while to get to it. It was really amazing to be able to explore the French countryside that way. The architecture in the Loire Valley is, as I've said before, so beautiful. Some of the houses look like little hobbit holes, and it's actually difficult for me to imagine real people living in them. A lot of the towns we passed were built into the side of a hill, and there were little rivers and lakes all over over the place.

The château was built in 1004 by a fierce Viking called Gelduin I. Over the years, is has been passed down through many wealthy families and it has always remained a private residence. The current owner is the Duke de Balcas. Charles Perrault, the author of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, was a guest there for a while and during his stay we was inspired by all of the winding staircases and narrow passageways to write "Sleeping Beauty."


When we got there, I could immediately tell why. The château is built on the edge of a huge forest and it sits on top of a hill. It actually looks like a castle, not just a huge, ornate building where a royal family lived. One of my favorite things about Europe is that people live in their history every day. If you take a walk down any street in Paris, you can tell that the buildings are old and that so many different generations of people have lived there. In the United States, we don't have many places like that. Since I've been in Europe, one of my favorite things to do has been to try and imagine what a building or a place was actually like when it was built (most of the time in the middle ages). There were hardly any people at the château, which made it really easy for me to do this. It also made me feel that I was really exploring something, not just that I was walking through a tourist attraction.


The first part of the château we went to was entirely dedicated to the Sleeping Beauty story. We had to climb several floors up a winding staircase, and when we got to the top they actually had different rooms with mannequins depicting different scenes of the tale. I wasn't expecting to see people, so I actually screamed when I saw the first room! One room was the scene where Aurora was born, another was a scene with Malificent and some subjects of her kingdom. The scariest room was at the top of a very small tower that we didn't find right away - it was depicting the scene where Malificent actually casts the spell on Aurora.

It was so much fun to be able to explore this gigantic château. The air was so fresh, and they had fires burning in most of the rooms, so it smelled a little like a bonfire. It made me feel very nostalgic, but in a good way. Here are some other pictures from Ussé:


After we were done looking around the château, we decided that since we had the car, we wanted to do some more exploring. We drove a couple kilometers to a medieval town called Chinon. Apprently Joan of Arc passed through this town and actually spent a couple nights. The old cathedral that was there during that time is still standing. We ate lunch at a bar called Le Jeanne d'Arc, where I had a croque monsieur and a Belgian beer called Leffe. It was such a cute bar - they had a Foosball table and a ping pong machine - and the owner had a dog who kept coming out from behind the bar to look at us, but who was too shy to actually come over and say hi. It was so cute.
When we were done eating, we wanted to see another château. I was surprised at how many signs we saw pointing toward various châteaux here and there. I knew there were a lot of châteaux in the Loire Valley, but I really had no idea that there were so many. We wound up driving to a town called Langeais, where the houses and shops were actually built right up around the château. It was so old and so beautiful, and it actually had a drawbridge. You could see where there used to be a moat around it, because it was all covered with moss and vines. We walked around the town for a little while, and then it started getting dark so we decided to head back.

It was truly a magical day, and I was so sad when it actually came to an end. It just goes to show, though, that the most thrilling adventures are sometimes the whimsical and spontaneous ones.