This chateau is a story about women. The original architect was called to fight in The Hundred Years' War and it was his wife who completed the building of it, in his absence. It was given to Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of King Henri II, and when he died his wife, Catherine de Medici, lived there. Finally it was a woman who saved the chateau from the inevitable looting and possible destruction during the French Revolution.
Chenonceau is also really well furnished and the rooms are staged with articles from the time period, like the kitchen shown below.
The grounds are also beautiful, with fountains and gorgeous flower beds, some still in full bloom.
Barry is looking pretty hopeful in the photo below, thinking he might have a few "Cathy-free hours" but what he didn't know is that I am a kind of labyrinth savant. I made it through in record time and didn't even break a sweat, if you didn't count the moment when a parent saw me elbow her little girl out of the way, also seen below. The child decided to use the little openings in the hedges to squeeze through and, well I just didn't think that was fair, so I gave her a little nudge.
Unlike Chenonceau, it is quite empty inside. It is visited for its view from the top. You get to see that view by climbing the double helix staircase, the design of which has been attributed by some historians to Leoanardo da Vinci.
Our next stop during our rainy week was in the city of Nantes. We chose it as a destination because of a whimsical kind of theme park which is being built in stages along the water front where ship yards used to be. It is called Les Machines de L'ile. Here some very creative minds have reimagined the machines from the fictional writing of Jules Verne. The most popular ride is on the Great Elephant which is 12 metres high, 8 metres wide and 21 metres long. The operator driving the machine can make its jointed legs move just like a real elephant, flap its huge leather ears, make it trumpet and spray water from its trunk. There are two levels on which the 49 passengers can stand. We had researched it before going to France and I had watched many YouTube videos but nothing prepared me for my ride on it. It was so much fun!
The eye lids open and close as it moves.
The other attraction drawing crowds in the last few years is the Marine World's Carousel which is 25 metres high and 22 metres in diameter on three levels, with a total of 35 creatures and 85 seats. Again, it is highly interactive and the operators coach you on how you can manipulate the creatures by using pedals and levers to make their wings and fins move. You can even produce smoke. We had three rides on it because we were Canadian, they said, and one of the operators was kind enough to take all of the pictures.
Nantes is an edgy city in the midst of some revitalization. We stayed in a relatively new hotel called Hotel Sozo which is a renovated church and the original stained glass window was above our bed!
The Jardin de Plants was across the street from our hotel. Like all of the parks we visited in France, it is designed for everyone to use with plenty of benches for older people and all kinds of interesting features for children like these "book birds" on high poles near to these little plant covered huts where a class of young children were engaged in learning activities with their teachers, the day we were there.
The next day we headed off to Saint Malo, a seaside town in Brittany, where I was introduced to the great taste of cider, the beverage of choice in this region. It is often served in a porcelain cup and it is delicious! The town was unbelievably quaint and our hotel room overlooked the beach, where the tide would roll out far, far away making a sandy beach and then it would roll in, with giant waves crashing against the sea wall, under our window.
The sunset was beautiful and on the second night there we watched this young man cast two lines off the sea wall into the serf.
Of course I had to take advantage of low tide to do my morning workout.
From Saint Malo, we did a day trip to Mont Saint Michel, the second most visited site in France. It was built as a monastery in the tenth century, on top of a cliff, originally isolated from the mainland at high tide. Now there is a causeway and it is a huge tourist destination with people wheeling their luggage to the lower level hotels. It does look lovely from a distance and even better at night when it is lit.
There is a huge amount of construction work going on to make it even more accessible to people. However all the roads in the world a aren't going to make the climb any easier for the thousands of elderly faithful who make the pilgrimage in order to see the church perched way up high.
We made it back to Saint Malo in time to "take the waters" as they used to say. We found a resort where we could pay a fee to use their spa saltwater series of pool treatments, which to these road weary souls was a little taste of heaven. I wish I had been allowed to take a photo of this place. Barry had to purchase a bathing cap and the steep entry fee was worth it alone to see my little Mark Spitz enter the pool area!
Our last stop was Honfleur in Normandy and it too, was incredibly picturesque. Our B&B host serves three course breakfasts and we come home every afternoon to home baked goodies on a plate in our room. We have stayed three nights and have really enjoyed this part of France.
I noticed this fisherman mending his nets, during one of our walks.
I will end this last report with a few words and photographs of the highlights of our road trip. It was our visit to the Juno Beach Centre and the Canadian War Cemetary in Beny-Sur-Mer. The museum at Juno Beach is very well done, with lots of information in text and pictorial form about the events leading up to the Canadian involvement in WWII, as well as video interviews with veteran soldiers. The part we most appreciated was the tour explaining the Atlantic wall, a German Bunker and the beach. The young guide was excellent and by the end of it I was in tears. Remarkably, she was able to convey so well the obstacles our troops had to face and the terrible loss of human lives involved in the Normandy campaign.
This is the monument outside the centre. I was saddened to learn that unlike the Americans, it took us a very long time to erect a site to commemorate the soldiers who died and it was due to the efforts of a Canadian veteran, Garth Webb, that the centre was created based on private, not government, funding. He came in 1994 for the fiftieth anniversary, since he was a participant in the actual D-Day landing. Shocked that nothing existed on the site, unlike Omaha, he made it his mission to build a memorial and it was opened in 2003. Almost one tenth of the Canadian population was involved in fighting in WWII. That number surprised me, as did the casualty number on June 6, 1944. The number of Canadians that died on that day was 359, despite the terrible odds working against them. Of course, the number would climb very high in the next two months. After his death, last year, his picture and story was displayed on this monument at the site.
With the help of the aging population of French citizens who lived through the occupation and were forced to build the tunnels and bunkers in the area, this German bunker was excavated not too long ago.
This is the entrance to the cemetary which is the resting place for the just over 2000 Canadian troops who died during the Normandy invasion. It is financed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and maintained by the French. It is so peaceful and the grounds are so well maintained. We placed some flowers by the entrance and took some time to walk among the graves and to read the names and the inscriptions and it was the second time during the day that I cried. It was truly heart breaking to read the words sent by loved ones to be engraved on tombstones that very few would ever have the chance to visit. The most heartbreaking graves were the headstones engraved with the words, "known only to God".
New trees are always being planted by the look of the different growths and a huge variety of perennials grow all along the row of headstones. Some individual or individuals has put a lot of planning and care into the design and maintenance of this cemetary and I felt good about that. I just wished in my heart that every wife, daughter, son, father, mother, brother and sister of all of these fallen soldiers could have seen what I saw at the site of their loved one's grave.
So here we are the night before we catch our plane home. It has been 49 days, 15 different hotels/B&Bs, 4500 km and more crepes than I care to count! It has also been the time of our lives and I want to thank you all for sharing it with us through your messages and emails. I've had a whole pile of fun but I miss my Canada. I'm coming home!
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