Tours, Vouvray and Ambroise

Jewelery box made for Catherine of Medici with a false bottom

Leonardo da Vinci's tomb in St Hubert's chapel

Royal chateau of Ambroise

View of the Loire from the chateau

Beautifully marked kittens at the B&B in Vouvray

Tuesday 29th September
A mixed day, we got to know Tours quite well; visited the Cathederal St Gatien (another Saint we must look up) which is being restored as it’s made of the local limestone and is crumbling. Having ‘done Tours’ and made arrangements for tonight we left the city heading eastwards towards Blois stopping for lunch at a picnic site adjacent to the troglodyte caves. The Tourist office had assured us we’d see rare species such as beavers and red squirrels, not many of them about but an awful lot of single men lurking behind bushes in varying stages of undress. What could they all have been doing?? We beat a hasty retreat, phew!!
Anyway we made it to Vouvray (Hooray I said) which is north of the river and a very scary bridge to cross too.
Life immediately got much better we visited the Chateau Moncontour hoping to take a tour but it was closing time so we only had time for a tasting (quelle domage) the fizz Cuvee Predilection 2006 @ e7.25 was good enough for any wedding. We then popped into the church in Vouvray (on our way to the supermarket) and it had all 14 stations of the cross. I didn’t photograph them all as it might bore you but did the last one to prove that there are 14! We are staying at an old watermill in the middle of nowhere where we can’t have supper because we booked in too late but we have a picnic. The Belle Mere was so impressed by Vivi’s French as they laid a table in the garden together for our supper that she gave us a bottle of yet more Vouvray made by a friend in the village. A good end to the day.

Wed 30th Sept.
We went off to find the way on to Ambroise via the ‘Loire a Velo’ which is much publicized in the area. In theory it takes you all the way down the Loire and around the wine and chateaux off-road. However it is not quite finished in places. We were floundering a bit at the side of a major road junction, when a fellow cyclist passed by. He immediately took it upon himself to show us the 4 miles on to the correct route at Montlouis sur Loire. It was certainly the speediest part of our trip so far, as he was in full mountain bike kit. We were reminded of following ski instructors down un-pisted mogul fields at breakneck speed! Neither of us dared to have a puncture as we hurtled around pot holes and crevasses on a mountain biking road and there were a few worries about the whiskey bottle breaking in our panniers. However all was well and we crossed the Loire at the side of a 3’ wide foot path alongside a railway. I was very relieved a train did not appear as there was not room for us all. We then proceeded at a more leisurely pace through the first vineyards of our trip. The grapes tasted just fine!.
We ended up at Ambroise, a very pretty town on the banks of the Loire.We visited the Royal Chateau, built in the 14-1500s and was one of the first renaissance chateaux to be built. The most interesting part was seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s tomb there, in the beautiful small chapel of St Hubert. He had lived there for the last 4 years of his life teaching art and inventing things and it was quite humbling to be sitting in the same gardens as the great man himself.
The town was horribly full of tourists and rather expensive so dinner (spoilt by a very tall American boy with huge feet in old trainers which really smelt) and the B and B made the experience not very special!