Amboise

The second day of Sarah and Tom's visit was a Wednesday, a day the kids don't have school, so we decided to ride the train to Amboise, a city on the Loire between Blois and Tours. It was a little less than a kilometer's walk from the train station to the chateau at Amboise, shown at left from the bridge over the Loire.

It's a little hard to tell from any of our pictures (we didn't bring our helicopter that day), but the Amboise chateau sits up on a promontory just next to the Loire, which means that once you climb up to the grounds adjacent to the chateau, you're sort of in a manicured park high up on a cliff above the surrounding area. So in the picture here, you have to remember that this placid-looking scene is surrounded by hundred-foot drops to the left, right, and rear. Off in the distance on the right is a manicured garden filled with headstones capped with brass circles filled with Arabic script. It turns out that Amboise was also where the Algerian national hero Abd al-Qadir was imprisoned for a time with about 80 of his family members (before he was released and later awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur).

Of course being up this high makes for some spectacular views of the river, Amboise, and the surrounding countryside. You get a bit of a sense of this in the picture at left, looking from one turret to another at a pair of teeny-tiny girls.

This picture of Molly and Betsy reminds me of an old Far Side cartoon, where two guys are standing on the Great Wall of China looking out and one says to the other, "Now we'll see if that dog can get in here!"

Speaking of engineering marvels, Amboise was the home of Leonardo da Vinci during the last few years of his life. In 1516, King Francois I, who was from Amboise and lived in the Chateau much of the time, invited Leonardo to take up residence about half a kilometer down the road in the chateau du Clos Lucé. Officially, Leonardo's title was "first painter, engineer and architect of the King" but really his only duty was to chat regularly with Francois, who supposedly even had a tunnel built from the Clos to the big chateau so that he (the king!) could visit Leonardo regularly. We found a nice writeup of the chateau and the Clos Lucé, with quite a few more pictures of Amboise, on the travel blog of two people named Jeff and Cindy.

We felt a bit bad because the combination of the constraints imposed by the train schedules and the fact that Molly had a choir practice that evening back in Orléans meant that we had to limit our time in Amboise to less than four hours. In particular we would have liked to visit the little wine shop we'd read about that gives free samples of local wines. (It's embedded in the defensive walls of the chateau!) and to stay a bit longer at Clos Lucé (we could easily have spent a lot more time in the rooms at the end of the tour containing small models of tens of Leonardo's various amazing inventions and we missed the gardens entirely).

But, train schedule or no, the girls were a bit worn out, particularly Betsy. Molly, to her credit, walked without complaint the whole time -- even when her sister was being carried. During our mad dash from the clos Lucé back past the chateau and across the river to catch our train (roughly a mile), she kept up a blistering pace that left all of the adults very impressed. Betsy fell asleep in Dave's arms during this walk and did not wake up even after we propped her up against Sarah in the train. As luck would have it, the first real drops of rain began falling just as our train pulled into the station, so all in all our departure was well-timed.