01 June 2014

Reverse order: Châteaudun

I'm back in Saint-Aignan after three days in Paris. It was a good trip. Yesterday we left the city at about 8:15 a.m. and spent the day on the road, arriving here at 5:30 p.m. The distance we covered was about 175 miles — a lot of it on little winding roads.

The car I rented for the trip to Paris was this one, a Kia Rio. I rented it at the SuperU supermarket in Saint-Aignan.

I call this reverse order because the first photos I'm posting come from the last place we stopped. It was the the city of Châteaudun, about 90 minutes north of us and little way south of Chartres.There's a big château there, as you would imagine, and also a big church called L'Eglise de la Madeleine. I don't know much about it.


Actually, I stopped in Châteaudun to visit the public toilet there. In France, if you travel around the same region a lot, pretty soon you start noticing and remembering where the public facilities are. Or the fast food restaurants, which you can sneak into to use the toilet. I've been to Chateaudun several times over the last 10 or 12 years, and knew it would be a good mid-afternoon pit stop. But passons...


Wikipedia doesn't tell me much about the church in Châteaudun — just that it is a Catholic church (duh...) and that it was listed as a national monument by the French government in 1922. What I can tell you is that it's enormous seen from inside, it's perched on the edge of a cliff above a ravine where there's a road and a lot of houses, and it's absolutely luminous inside because the windows are huge and made of light-colored glass.

6 comments:

  1. The church is very old and impressive. I believe it's worth visiting it.

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  2. The amount of natural light inside is so unusual and impressive. Of course, great photos!

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  3. I was thinking just what Mitchell said -- unusual to see that much light, especially in a mostly Romanesque church. This is so bright and airy! I see on this website that the church suffered a terrible and very destructive fire in 1940 when fuel trucks parked near it were bombed.

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  4. >>a terrible and very destructive fire in 1940
    And that's probably why there's no stained glass in the windows. Interesting that there were no pews or chairs; is the church unused for services?

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    Replies
    1. Hi Chris, there are chairs in the church, just not in my photo. I'll show them soon.

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