JulieVikmanis

Overview
Spring seems to be the perfect time to visit the Loire valley. Everything was in bloom and the weather we experienced was nearly perfect when we visited April 24 to May 8.
In 13 days we stayed in 4 hotels (Chateau de Rochecotte and Manior les Minimes in the Loire, H. de Toiras on Ile de Re, and Parc St. Severin in Paris�friends stayed at the Lotti there), toured 9 chateaux, visited the Ile de Re and La Rochelle for a relaxing break from all the chateaux, and spent 4 happy days in Paris as the city seemed to be coming alive for the warmth and excitement of spring and summer. It was wonderful.

Background and getting there
Our traveling companions were new, friends of our son who are closer in age to my husband and me and have now become our friends in our new home in Ft. Lauderdale. They are fine travelers whose stories are all new to us (and ours new to them, giving DH the opportunity to repeat things I�ve heard hundreds of times but, hey, who�s counting). Our airline was also new�Delta--direct from Miami to Paris, something our old standby, Northwest from our days in Minnesota, could not provide us. We arrived on time at CDG to start our journey at 8:05 a.m. Slept a fair amount on the way and experienced very little jetlag as we jumped into our touring.

We�d arranged a car through Hertz to drive immediately to the Loire. For 4 passengers we�d ordered an SUV type van and when they didn�t have that available, they offered us a Mercedes or Rolls touring car or somesuch at a mere 3000 euros, three times the price we�d been quoted originally. We finally settled on a Passat station wagon that barely held our 4 large and 4 small bags, but it did and that�s what counted. And so we were off.

Driving was glorious. It was sunny with temps in the 70s and out the window we could see a canvas of green and yellow as we drove through fields of luminescent yellow mustard interspersed with fields of greens. Fabulous!!

Loire Valley West
Our first stop was Orleans with its grand cathedral filled with flag displays and with flags on the buildings leading up the street to it. By the time we reached Orleans it was noon and we were able to eat outdoors at a simple café raising our hopes that we might be able to have many meals outdoors even at this early time of year. Besides touring the cathedral we also filmed the old Hotel Groslot with its lovely gardens where tulips and pansies were blooming profusely and checked out the Place Martoi, the gigantic main square of the town with its big statue of Joan of Arc, their native daughter.

By about 4 p.m. we�d completed the day�s journey and arrived at our base for the next three nights while we explored the western Loire�the Chateau de Rochecotte. This was our 4th stay at the Rochecotte, having first stayed there in 1990. It�s fun to return to see what new improvements have been made�a swimming pool, much landscaping, an elevator. The place is fantastic. It was a present from Talleyrand to the Duchess de Dino, the wife of his nephew and his companion on various diplomatic missions and in his old age. The story made somewhat confusing in an English translation is available from the owners. Our friends had a double for 168 euros and ours with approximately 10 square meters more space was 198, otherwise the views were identical�onto the 300 year old pine tree and the gardens. The public rooms are lovely, furnished increasingly with antique pieces (when we were first there, many of the pieces were somewhat modern apparently to be replaced as resources have permitted over the years.) You can relax and take tea or cocktails there. The dining room has not changed over the years�thank goodness. It has high ceilings, lowered by the presence of 4 columns placed about 10 feet from the corners of the room to break up the space and make it seem more intimate. Everything is in soft tones of peach with all the usual sparkling glassware and napery. They offer a menu for 39 euros, a wonderful deal. We ate two meals there. Our first was salmon pinwheels stuffed with sorrel and mushrooms, duck breast in a honeyed brown sauce and mushroom nems, a very respectable cheese cart from which I selected a new favorite, St. Felicien, strawberry meringues with sliced strawberries and strawberry sorbet, all accompanied by a nice bottle of local Bourguiel. Lovely place. Good dining. I recommend the Rochecotte highly. I also recommend that if you go there, you arrange to eat your breakfast elsewhere. At 16 euros per person for pretty much standard continental breakfast fair of rolls, juice, jam and coffee, it�s the one thing they do that�s just �not worth it.�

In our first three days we toured the chateaux at Langeais, Azay le Rideau, and Villandry, plus a stop at Montreuil Bellay enroute to Ile de Re.

Langeais was the scene of the wedding between Charles the 2nd and Anne of Brittany. They have a tableau of the wedding with wax figures and a recording in French of the history. The big deal here is the tapestries though the elaborately tiled floors are IMO even more interesting. The place seems quite livable. Sadly the beautifully pruned pine trees in the garden behind the chateau appear to have died from winterkill or something similar. Really too bad, because it�s always been a nice little garden. The town of Langeais is also worth a walk around. The locals are doing a lot to improve the place for tourists and it has sufficient natural charm to reward a little exploration.

Azay-le-Rideau is a romantic looking place on a moat with lacy gables made even prettier at this time of year by the blooming wisteria covering many of its out-buildings. Nice grounds surround it and a bride was having her pictures done there while we toured. IMO the grounds and exterior of the chateau are much better than the interior which could be skipped if you�re on a tear to do �5 castles in one day� or similar.

Having done a lot of reading and planning for this trip as per usual, I was hot to see some new areas and steered the party to nearby Candes St. Martin and Montseureau after leaving Azay le Rideau. Not worth the time. So much for excessive reading.

Villandry is a perennial favorite though having always been to its wonderful gardens in the fall when the vegetables are at their peak I was worried that spring might be a bit of a let down. Happily this was not the case. The flower gardens were filled with tulips and lacy multi-colored flowers whose names I do not know but whose blooms were a perfect background for the tulips. Our friends had not previously been to the Loire and it�s so nice to see the delight of people who are viewing these magnificent gardens for the first time. The place is truly breathtaking. Our little surprise was the interior of the chateau. In three previous visits we�d never entered it. It�s lovely, with nice furnishings especially the kitchen and the dining room�always my favorite, wonder why--a room I could have happily sat down in for a sumptuous repast and felt very comfortable. The place is in a nice, livable scale and the dining room, like the Rochecotte�s, is a pleasant shade of peach, or better, shrimp.

Lunch after our visit to Villandry was at L�Etape Gourmand, Domaine de la Giraudiere, a place I�d read of in my Cadogan guide to the Loire. It�s an operating goat farm that sells cheese and serves goat in their little homely restaurant. Mama spoke perfect English and explained that she�d opened her place as a restaurant pretty much on the urging of friends who�d dined at her table. The place is very cute and does a booming business including bus tours. Since goat is my favorite meat, I had to do the goat lunch�goat and pork terrine with salad, a slice of goat with its skin served in a soup bowl with gravy and long thin turnips. It was good but not quite as goaty as I was hoping for. DH had suckling pig with a fois gras starter. The bathrooms are in a building across from the restaurant and require you to go through the goat barns to get there. Actually not as rustic as it sounds but interesting.

Saumur was to have been a stop on our way between the Loire and the Ile de Re but we only took a few pictures and moved on. Much to our amazement a sign was posted near the entry to the drawbridge saying that it was under renovation since one side of the ramparts had collapsed. There were pictures and a newspaper article and apparently no one was hurt but that�s just not the kind of thing to inspire confidence as you think about touring additional castles/chateaux.

Montreuil-Bellay thus became our only stop enroute to Ile de Re. We�d stopped briefly on a previous visit but had not gone in. This time we took the tour�the only guided tour of the 9 chateaux we visited. It�s associated with wine and had a cave where a wine-making/drinking fraternity was formed and met. They also sell their own wines on the way out. Not bad.

Besides touring chateaux, we spent an afternoon touring Tours, the largest city in the Loire valley area. People don�t speak favorably about the town so we�d steered clear of it until the trip before this. I�d enjoyed walking around it then, especially the Place Plumereau with its half timbered buildings. Just couldn�t recreate that good vibe this time around. Maybe what folks say is just plain right.

Ile de Re
On an earlier trip to the Loire, I�d searched about for a way to break up the monotony of all chateaux, all the time that touring the Loire can become. An article in Gourmet magazine pointed me in the direction of Ile de Re and we�ve gone back three times now. It�s a small island off the coast of France in the Atlantic just beyond La Rochelle. We�ve stayed previously at Le Richelieu in Les Flottes which is quite modern, has wonderful views of the ocean and a great spa. It�s also quite pricey and this time they had no room even when I contacted them 3 or 4 months in advance. So we settled for a new place in St. Martin en Re, the largest city on the island. The place is Hotel de Toiras. It belongs, like the Richelieu to the Relais and Chateau chain. It�s only been around for 2 years and it only has 8 rooms or so. For 180 euros our room was small but beautifully outfitted in a chic Laura Ashley fashion. It had no view of the harbor (which would drive the price up substantially) but it opened onto a lovely small courtyard where we could sit and have drinks and relax far from the madding crowd�and I do mean crowd. Turns out we were on Ile de Re for one of the busiest holidays of the year�May Day.

On previous trips we�d been there in September/October and while there were people there, it was certainly not crowded. This, the hotel staff told me, was equivalent to the crowds they experience in July and August. Since May Day fell on a Monday, we were there on a rare 3 day weekend and everyone who has places on the island as well as many touring like us were there. In the afternoons the crowds around the boat basin were pratically body to body and in the evenings the lines at the ice cream stand reached 20 deep.

Even with the crowds, the place was still charming, in a very Nantucket sort of a way. Lots of sailboats moored in the harbors, lots of sidewalk cafes serving plateau de fruits de mer, lots of shopping in boutiques offering everything nautical imaginable, including especially those striped boat neck shirts in blue on cream, cream on blue, red on white, white on red�you get the picture. That stuff is timeless and everyone wears it everywhere on the island. I even found a sundress made of it for my daughter who runs with the sailboat crowd.

There isn�t a lot of monumental sightseeing on the island but there are good markets. We took in the daily covered market in St. Martin en Re and the weekly Saturday outdoor market in La Flotte. Both have beautiful displays of vegetables and, of course, all manner of fish. The other thing they have in abundance is salt, the currently popular sea salt called fleur de sel which they harvest on the western side of the island where you can visit the mucky salt fields. Salt and oysters are definitely the big industries of Ile de Re.

Besides shopping, relaxing and sailing, another big thing to do on Ile de Re is bicycle. There are paths all over the island and families riding everywhere. After two knee replacements I opted not to tempt fate this time but it is a fun way to get from one small town to another.

Another diversion we opted for was a day in La Rochelle, back across the long bridge from Ile de Re. The harbor with its two large towers guarding it makes a nice picture and the harbor front with its artists and outdoor cafes makes for a nice stroll. So does the part of the town beyond the harbor entered from under the massive clock tower. While there we returned to an old favorite for lunch, Les Flots, the harbor front restaurant of Gregory Coutanceau, son of Richard whose eponymous (I hate that word) restaurant in town boasts 2 Michelin stars. Food was still excellent but portion size had declined while prices had advanced proving that while success doesn�t always spoil a place, it can certainly alter it. When we left I picked up a card showing that since I�d last been there about 5 years or so ago, young Gregory has built himself an empire and now has 4 places in town, one directly across the street from my former favorite with a more casual atmosphere and less pricey menu. It�s getting harder and harder to keep up my foodie credentials. Need to travel and eat more, I guess.

Our meals on Ile de Re were generally good. Lots of fish and seafood, of course. One was at our hotel. They don�t have a separate dining room but can serve up to 14 total at small tables for two or four in their two public rooms�the entry and nominally their breakfast room. We opted for dinner there one evening and were pleased to have well prepared food in what felt like a private home. The evening was made even more special when one of our friends who majored in piano in college and played professionally in lounges for some of his career, stepped up to the only slightly out of tune piano and played for us and the other guests. Nice to travel with your own entertainment.

Return to the Loire Valley - East
After three days on Ile de Re, we were ready to return to the grueling job of chateau touring. For this, the eastern, part of the trip, we selected Manoir les Minimes in Amboise as our base, based primarily on the many glowing recommendations I�d read here on Fodors and the fact that Conde Nast Johanssen had named them most value for money hotel in Europe. We weren�t disappointed. For 170 euros each, we and our traveling companions had two double rooms with sitting areas and large bathrooms and views out to the garden of the hotel then up to the chateau of Amboise to the left and to the Loire to the right. All that and Olga the wonderful old house dog as well, plus lovely public rooms for cocktails and free internet and nice breakfasts for a mere 11.50 euros per person. Alternately you could take your drinks or your coffee outside to sit under the sweet smelling, beautiful wisteria branches and soak up the sun. The place is pretty well perfect and the staff and owners show both it and their guests great care.

For this three day stint we saw 5 chateaux�Amboise, Chenonceau, Cheverny, Chambord, and Blois.

Amboise sits on a hill above the town and the river in the midst of lovely grounds and sports the final resting place of Leonardo de Vinci in his own small but magnificent chapel away from the chateau.

Chenonceau is IMO (and most everyone else�s) the most beautiful of all with its two adjoining gardens, one for the wife�the smaller�and one for the mistress. The tour is self-guided and the rooms are nice made even more lovely by grand floral arrangements�lots of different colored hydrangeas and best of all a wonderful, large display of lily of the valley in moss, traditional for the May Day holiday just past.

For once Cheverny did not thwart me. We finally were privileged to see the hounds at their 5 p.m. feeding frenzy, a pretty macabre but interesting sight. Cheverny is quite different from the other chateaux. It looks more British than French in its white stone and rectangular shape. It is a hunting lodge of sorts and has a pack of its own breed of hunting dogs, sort of a cross between beagles and bloodhounds. Not sure of specifics but about 50 or more are housed in a separate, large kennel on the grounds. They are herded out of the feeding area just before feeding time and wait crushed behind a gate while their keepers put out the bones across a water trough. As the gates open they rush out and halt as their keepers maintain them at bay until they give the signal to begin. Then they all rush forward to grab the biggest, meatiest bones, fight with each other for them and gnaw away as the assembled blood thirsty/camera clicking crowds watch. But the place is not just about dogs and hunting, it also has one of the most well furnished interiors with lovely period pieces and a nice homey feel, like you could really live there.

Chambord is to chimneys what Cheverny is to dogs. It�s the largest chateau by far, though fairly sparsely furnished. It�s big draw is the central staircase with two sets of stairs so you can ascend one without meeting the person descending the other. While we were there a school group with their monk teacher split into two groups and held a race to the top from the two stairways. The place reverberated with cheers as the victorious group announced their arrival. It�s fun to walk about the roof to observe the many chimneys up close and to get great views back down to the grounds below. Since our last visit they�ve added an entry pavilion with a nicely done 15 minute movie showing the architectural stages of the place. Chambord was the highlight for one of our traveling companions who had preserved a book he�d bought of the place at age 12 vowing sometime to see it in person, and so he did, approximately 50 years later.

Blois was our final chateau. Though not unique in any way (except possibly for its Italianate look and position directly in a larger town), it provided a nice finale to our time covering the chateaux of the Loire.

I�m big on ratings and rankings. We often rate restaurants, wines and hotels when we travel. This trip we rated/ranked chateaux. As usual there was no unanimity. Chenonceau was ranked 1, 1, 2 and 3 among the four of us. Not surprisingly Chambord came in second with one first, two seconds and a 4th. Villandry with its gardens was 3rd overall with Langeais and Cheverny tied for 4th. What this shows, if anything, is that it�s hard to tell people which chateaux they�ll enjoy the most and should definitely plan to visit. The answer as always is, it depends. What it depends on seems to be what you like and what each place has to offer. I may take some hits for saying this, but in some ways, visiting the chateaux of the Loire is a lot like visiting the wineries of the Napa and Sonoma valleys. Like Gypsy Rose Lee�ya gotta have a gimmick---in order to distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack. In Langeais it�s floors and tapestries. At Azay le Rideau it�s moat and romanticism. At Villandry it�s gardens. At Chenonceau it�s gardens, arcades over the river and floral arrangements in the interior. At Amboise it�s elevation and Leonardo. At Montreuil-Bellay it�s the wine. At Cheverny it�s the dogs. At Chambord it�s the staircase, the chimneys and the scale. At Blois, if anything, it�s that wonderful equestrian statue over the doorway, but I�m losing it. And if we�d done more (which we have in the past) the distinctions would have become even more blurred.


Chartres and the road to Paris

We exited the Loire by going northeast to Chartres where we stopped for a walk through and around the cathedral with its beautiful windows and to take some really miserable pictures. It�s not for nothing that you see so many people with their tripods set up and trained on the windows. My hand held shots were terrible, but then I�m not the photographer in the family. What I am is the eater in the family and I managed to score some unctuous pigs� feet at a touristy little place directly across from the cathedral. Love it when you just chance upon something that you�d hoped to find but would have had a terrible time searching out.

To save ourselves the misery of driving into Paris to drop off our rental car, we arranged to drop it in Chartres and take the train into Paris. Good plan. Small flaw. Unlike most cities, Chartres does not have a car drop off at the railroad station so the addition of a taxi ride from the drop off to the station became necessary. Otherwise, the plan worked and made for a much more relaxing entrance to the City of Light.

Paris
Paris was in the midst of a spring heat wave with temps in the 28 to 30 degree centigrade range. Everyone was outside at cafes or sitting on the footbridge across the Seine having improvised picnics with bottles of wine and baguettes. It was glorious and we wallowed in the great weather and our great good fortune at being there.

By this time we�d split from our friends who had taken off for their hotel near the Place de Vendome, the Lotti, while we had deposited our luggage at our old faithful Parc St. Severin in the 5th arrondissement. We walked to meet them at the Lotti and found them disappointed in their choice. While the public rooms were lovely and even included a keyboardist in the bar, their room was too small causing them to bargain for an upgrade which later proved problematic being next to a whining air-conditioner. The final happy ending was that they were moved again to a suite which was the largest Paris hotel room I�ve been in since our first trip to Paris in 1973 when for a mere 60 dollars per night we stayed at the Intercontinental having arrived without any reservations and unable to find anything less expensive in all of Paris. But that�s another story and besides the price has changed.

In the interest of your interest Dear Reader (and you are, indeed, dear, if you�ve hung with me this long) and my wrists, I�ve got to cut this report shorter. Here�s what we did in Paris:

Visited a hospital to try to find a friend we�ve met in Paris before (he�s a retired professor of English who spends 3 months each spring and fall there and writes wonderful reports of his wanderings) and whom we were supposed to have had lunch with while there. I�d gotten an e-mail from a friend of his saying he had been hospitalized and would not make our luncheon appointment. Between my poor French and the standard bureaucratic problems associated with hospitals everywhere, this proved a futile effort but got us into an interesting part of town we�d not explored much previously.

Visited street markets at both ends of the spectrum�the President Wilson in the 16th with flawless produce and artful displays for the well-to-do of that area, and the longest market I�ve ever gone to, the Belleville on the border between the 11th and 20th, where the stars are the people rather than the produce. Both the sellers and the buyers are of every imaginable ethnic background and the cacophony of sales chants is fantastic. Also returned to our old favorite Rue Mouffetard market street, this time on a Sunday and saw the accordionist with tourists and locals joining him in song and even a couple or two dancing to his tunes.

Passed by Pere Lachaise cemetery but didn�t go in
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Failed once again to get past the long lines to tour the modern art collection at Palais de Tokyo or to find the fashion museum across the street from it open for a visit.

Walked through the Tuilleries with hordes of others enjoying the warm spring weather and walked along the Seine wherever the spirit moved us as well as past the Sorbonne, the Pantheon, and St. Sulpice. Mostly we just soaked it all up and wallowed in the luxury of great weather in a wonderful place.

Our friends toured the Clignancourt flea market and found it horribly overpriced, though the high prices made them feel wonderfully good about purchases made more reasonably in previous trips. They also took in the Pompidou permanent collection which they found atrocious. Made me feel better about never having done that although it�s been on my list of �next times� forever.

Ate several good and pretty good meals at: Le Grand Colbert (yes, the Diane Keaton/Jack Nicholson place and amazingly enough with its newfound popularity with a same day reservation), Chez Clovis near Les Halles our all time favorite old fashioned bistro, Le Vagabond between the Louvre and the Opera in the 1st, and Louis Vins, a new wine bar in the 5th.

And ate three really, really good meals at: Le Dauphin near the Palais Royale, at Les Zygomates in the 12th really off the beaten path but very worthwhile with a 35 euro, four course lunch, and at Fish, La Boisonniere, on Rue de Seine in the 6th.

For once I�ll not go into a plate by plate description of what we had at each place, but the information is all in my notes, so I�ll be happy to provide specifics to anyone who wants them.

All in all, this was a wonderful trip with plenty of old favorites, a few new, and terrific spring weather, scenery and foliage. Can�t beat that

blh

Thanks for a wonderful and informative trip report. We will be in France at the same time next year - and I have been wondering about the holiday on May 1 and May 8. They will both fall on Tuesday next year, but there will still probably be many people on a four day weekend holiday. I know things will be more crowded and some closed, but think we should be able to find enough to keep us busy! Thanks again for your report!

JulieVikmanis

Actually the problem we had was not with May 1 but May 2. Since Amboise, like Ile de Re, is essentially a tourist mecca, everything including the restaurants were open on the 1st even though they'd normally have been closed since that was a Monday. They closed, however, on Tuesday to give their staff the holiday/day off they would normally have had, making it almost impossible for us to find a place to dine on Tuesday. We wound up at a Chinese restaurant, making my husband the Chinese food fan, the happiest camper. Place, directly on the main street beneath the chateau turned out to be quite good with generous helpings of black mushroom laced treats.

blh

Thanks, Julie. Guess it's possible that the closings will be on Monday next year and then open on the Tuesday holidays. We probably need to be prepared for closings on either day. I'm sure we'll find some things open hopefully!

stokebailey

Lovely report. Thank you!

JulieVikmanis

Topping for betsyped. Betsy, on this trip we did the Loire Valley in two segments, east and west, staying at the Rochecotte in the latter and Manoir de Minimes in the former, with a break at the Ile de Re in between to break up the steady diet of chateaus. The report includes info on both hotels and on some of the "lesser" chateaus. Hope it's helpful