Chateau de la Noue

We rented a wing of this chateau for five nights during our vacation. It's located a little northeast of the city of Tours, France, close to the little town of Villedomer, and near the Vouvray wine region. We used it as our base of operations for touring the Loire region.


This is the second time we've tried renting a place to stay on vacation rather than staying in a hotel. We love renting. You get more space and better amenities than when you stay in a hotel. We are able to relax in the morning with breakfast at home in our pajamas, and we can come home in the evening and make dinner on our own schedule. We also have a washer and dryer so we can do laundry whenever we feel like it. That really helps cut down on the luggage you have to carry around the world on long vacations. We found this particular place on VRBO. The listing there also had a link to the owner's website. It happened to be available on the dates we were interested in, so we booked it.

The owner, Madame Marie-Christine Miller, spends half of her year living in California, and the other half of her year in France restoring la Noue. The chateau has been in her family for about 200 years. She shared several memories and photos of herself as a little girl at the chateau. Some time between then and now, it fell into disrepair, and so she's been slowly tacking the huge job of renovating it room by room for the last decade or so. She has completed the renovation of the short wing of the house, and that's the part we rented.


The chateau dates back to the 16th century. I think parts of it were added on at different times over the years. It also has some fairly extensive grounds. It's surrounded by a little wood. We asked if we could wander around out there, and Christine said we certainly could, but warned us that hunting season had just begun. We stuck to the edges, though we did take a little hike down a nearby train track one day to see an old viaduct that was near the chateau.

We had two floors of the short wing. On the ground floor there was a little kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a laundry room, and a half bathroom. The kitchen was fully equipped, and the living room had a stereo, a television and a DVD player with some movies to watch in the evenings. The house also had wireless internet so we could keep in touch with everyone
back at home and get some news every day.


On the upper floor were three bedrooms and two full bathrooms. We had plenty of space to spread out! We stayed in the yellow bedroom. The blue childrens' bedroom was attached to our bedroom and made a convenient place to store our luggage. The green bathroom was also attached to our bedroom. The red room was down the hall and had its own little attached bath.


We were given a tour of the rest of the chateau one afternoon. Jeff was walking around taking photographs and he ran into Christine and asked her about part of the chateau, which led to us being invited in to see the rest of the place. Christine and her sister had been out picking mushrooms earlier that day and were busy cleaning and sauteing them in her kitchen. We saw the little chapel that's located in one of the turrets, and then we moved into the rest of the house.


There is a pretty ballroom area in the middle of the long wing that Christine rents out for weddings and parties. She's also finished renovating a few individual bedrooms up on the second floor. The red dog is named Popov. He came to visit us every day. He's very old, and very sweet tempered.


Many of the rooms are still in pretty bad shape, but it was still fun to see them because we were able to see how the house was originally constructed.


Here's another shot of our rental car for the first week of the trip... I know some people like to see the cars we can't get over here. If you ever go over there, be sure to rent a diesel. Gas is VERY expensive in Europe and having a diesel that gets great mileage really cuts down on the gas bills!