House Of Boy and Girl: Chateau de Chenonceau

We began our first full day in the Loire with a drive south through the farm land surrounding our little chateau, across the Loire river, and on south through a forest and more farm land to the town of Chenonceaux. Just outside this little town is Chateau de Chenonceau and its extensive network of gardens and grounds.

Chenonceau in its current state was built in the early 1500s. It's been home to many people over the years, but its most famous residents were probably Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Medici. Diane was the mistress of Henry II, and Catherine was his wife. Diane was kicked out of the chateau when Henry II died, and Catherine moved in. Nice story, isn't it?

We parked in the parking lots near the town and followed a path through the trees to get to the chateau. We decided to start our tour inside the chateau and save the gardens for the afternoon.

This is one of the more feminine or fairy tale-ish castles we've been to in Europe, and it's extremely popular with tourists. At most of the other very popular sites we've been to, you usually buy a ticket and get to wait until a certain entry time before you're allowed to start your tour. Not so for Chenonceau. This place was a free for all, tour as you please sort of place, and it was wall-to-wall bodies inside. Therefore we were only able to get decent photographs of things like the ceiling or objects high up on the walls.

For example... we give you the upper half of the chapel!

and... another ceiling!

This is the gallery over the river. Things opened up a bit there.

We got lucky in the kitchen and managed to get a picture of the HUGE stove in the middle of the room.

I'm not sure which took longer to create, the painting or the frame?

There were extremely elaborate and beautiful flower arrangements decorating many of the rooms, but as Jeff was the one holding the camera during our visit, we didn't get any photos of those. (Boys don't notice these things.) I'd also instructed him to not take photos of EVERYTHING so I wouldn't have to scrapbook 2000 photos after this trip. Anyway, if you want to see more of the inside of Chenonceau, I recommend you look at the 360 degree room tours on their website.

We finished our tour of the inside of the chateau and headed over to the Orangerie building to grab a bite to eat in the cafeteria. We were pleasantly surprised to find that they offered some pretty tasty meals there and Jeff enjoyed some nice roast medallions of pork while I had some roast chicken. We split a garden salad and some fresh strawberries as well.

After lunch we went back outside to walk around the castle and tour the gardens.

There is a "small" garden to one side of the chateau that is named Catherine's garden. It's full of beautiful rose trees.

On the other side of the chateau is Diane's garden. It's bigger than Catherine's garden.

For some reason unbeknownst to us, we are frequently asked to either a) take photos of other people, or b) provide directions when we're on vacation in Europe. I guess we look trustworthy or perhaps just not lost all the time. We rarely ask for anyone to take our photo in return, but after we took a picture for another American couple, they offered to take ours, and so we went ahead and let them. It came out pretty nice.

We reached the far end of Catherine's garden and decided to take a different path back through the forest towards the parking lot and our rental car.

As we were walking back, we found this little maze in the middle of the forest. Of course we had to play in it for a while. It wasn't particularly challenging, but mazes like this are always fun to run through.