Tours

The last time we saw our heroines, they were busily sampling French pastries in the French capital and getting lost trying to navigate by the Seine (Flows Northward. Who knew?).

From here, they moved to the mini-Paris of Tours where there are plenty of bakeries but they are all closed on Sunday. As is everything else.

Everything.

But Tours and the Loire Valley in which it is located, is famous for one thing besides becoming totally abandoned on a Sunday: Castles.


Okay, technically they're palaces but that's just housing semantics and how many people really know the difference between a castle and a palace?

So, we rented some bikes from a helpful Frenchman, strapped on the safety helmets (a detail for all the mom readers) and biked 21 majestic kilometres (I hope you're all suitably impressed) along the river Cher to Villandry.

That's a wee little Jessie in the foreground biking away from a struggling me who was trying to take a decent picture while steering a bike and ended up in the picturesque French ditch.


The biking trails here are littered with photogenic things sitting around photogenically waiting to be photographed.


Finally, we got to Villandry, my new home.


This is my new bedroom.


This is the view from my window.


These are my gardens. I am going to spend the rest of my life in a big, floppy straw hat in my herb garden drinking tea and having deep discussions about herbacious borders with my French count. Apparently, he's single.


Because it's the low season, we had the entire palace to ourselves and spent an afternoon wandering through the rooms and the art galleries (we ran through the art galleries. If I was being polite, I would say that the family had eclectic taste. If I was being truthful, I would say that they enjoying buying tat), getting vertigo on the servants' stairs, having romantic fantasies on the turret and tower and re-enacting scenes from the Secret Garden in the extensive grounds.


Extensive and well-groomed grounds.


They even have their own forest.


In short, Villandry is the bestest place ever and if you're really, really nice to me and buy me lots of gelato, I might even let you visit me someday (plenty of room in the servants' quarters).