4 July – Gardens and Caves

4 July – Gardens and Caves

Our first stop today was at Villandry, only about 15km out of Tours, to see the gardens at the Chateau Villandry (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Villandry). The gardens are beautiful and require a huge amount of labour to maintain – there are lots of trimmed box hedges and manicured lawns. The vegetable gardens are immaculately laid out in geometric patterns – it is not clear whether the vegetables are ever eaten or if they are purely decorative. There are also fun elements such as a maze and children’s playground.

There were lots of other bicycle tourists on the route today, many also stopping at Villandry. Most of the route was on the river bank and easy going. We passed fields of sunflowers, about to flower (they will look amazing when they do).

Crossing the bridge at Candes-St-Martin, we had a view of the lovely stone church and town on the river. The road into town took us past the church. There were people having lunch at a restaurant right in front of it. We stopped to have a look – the church is from the 12-13th centuries, honors St Martin and has carvings of figures on the porch and high in the nave.

The ride was extremely picturesque from here on. We passed by several white cliffs where people had built houses around caves in the cliffs. We stopped at Turquant to have a closer look at some of them. They had art galleries in them, so we could look inside. One was a cafe where we had some fruit juice. The town around these caves had narrow streets with houses made of white stone and several artist studios.

Coming into Samur we stopped to see the Notre-Dame des Ardillers – a church with a huge dome built in the 17th century. This has been a place of pilgrimage since the 15th century when a farmer found a Pieta statuette buried in a field. He took it home but the next day found that she had returned to the same place. This happened two or three times over until the farmer constructed a stone arch on this place to shelter her, from which water sprung. This statue is still venerated today.

In all we did 97km today – around 85km to Saumur and the rest to the supermarket and back.

We are staying in a self catering cabin in a campground, mostly so that we can do some of our own cooking. This is the first time we are staying in a French campground. The cabin is not really cheaper to stay in than a hotel or bed and breakfast. I can see why families come here though as there are playgrounds and a children’s entertainment program. It is also pretty empty considering that it is high season (only about 30% full).

The campground is on an island in the middle of the Loire. You can look across the river and see the Chateau from parts of it.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.