Chambord

On Thursday, November 29, Mom and I set out to the store to get food for the rest of our stay in the Loire Valley. Loire Valley is where many kings lived in chateaus as summer homes or for hunting excursions. It is called, The Valley of the Kings and named after the Loire River that runs through it. After we got our food at the store, mom decided that we would go and see Chambord. It is a chateau where kings would have lived. Chambord, was on the pricey side, but Mom thought that it would be nice to get the audio guides too so we did. :) When they gave us the audio guides, they asked to see Moms drivers license. They then took it from us to keep until we came back. That was so that we would come back and give them their audio guides. :) I guess their audio guides do not have alarms on them. Most of the chateaus and castles have alarms set so that if you forget or try to take them the alarm will go off. :)

For Chambord they had no particular path suggested for you to go around in the house. The place was very big. I could get lost very easily! I did get separated from Mom one time. That happened on the big staircase, double helix style, in the center of the chateau! It starts on the first floor and goes the whole way to the top of the building and out! See below pic. It was really cool! Mom went up one stair and I went up the other stair. There were windows in the middle so that you could see each other across the open center shaft every 10-15 steps. See above pic for center of staircase. I got separated from Mom because she did not tell me what floor we were going to so I just went up, up, and up until I was at the top. I was getting nervous because Mom was not coming. So I started my way back down and then we found each other again.

The audio guides were very boring. When I started the audio guide it started about the history of the chateau. But it just went on and on about it. I stopped right in the middle of that and we went inside the building. The audio guides just got more and more boring, too much information. Yes, the first couple sentences that they said were interesting and all that I would have needed to know. I think the reason why they were not very exciting, for example, was that they would take 2-3 mins talking about a wallhanging, how it came to be, how it was made, who ordered it to be made, what the picture was about, etc. Another thing that was confusing was that the people who gave the guides to us said that they would tell us where to go. Well yes it did but the place was so big that we did not know where we were. We finally stopped listening to the audio guides and just walked around. Then we gave back our audio guides and left to go home. :)

Oh, yeah I forgot to say that the workers that were working there where setting up for Christmas. Christmas stuff everywhere! I also think if they were not there it might have been a little more exciting, because we were having to step over Christmas stuff! During the French Revolution everything that would have been in the chateau was sold and given away. The curators are still trying to get the furniture back, but it is a slow tedious job and there is very little information to go on. That is another reason there was just bare walls to look at and not much furniture and wallhangings to look at. In one part there were a couple of rooms where they had a display of Contemporary photography type art. That was not interesting at all. The picture below is a view of the landscape from the top of the chateau.

Mom and I were very thankful that we did not bring Jack, Briana, and Landon. Landon would have been bored out of his shoes and Briana would have quickly had enough too. Jack might have found it fun to look at a little, just like I did a little, but other than that it was not what we were thinking it would be.

Overall though, I was glad that we went so that I could see more of the French country and to see a place where king's would have lived!