Driving from Blois to Vouvray

It was late May 2001. We drove on the autoroute to get from the airport to the Loire Valley. Then we got off the autoroute at Blois. We drove from there to Vouvray on the route nationale along the Loire river. We were early and we weren't in a hurry. The weather was beautiful.

Two of the most impressive sights along the route were the Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire and the Château Royal d'Amboise. The river was smooth and shiny.

Fields of red poppies were all around us. This one was just outside Vouvray as we drove into the village. In the year 2000, I had bought myself a new digital camera, a Kodak DC4800, and I was enjoying taking pictures with it.

There were a lot of other wildflowers too. The woman we rented the Vouvray gîte from had put the arrangement you see on the right above on the mantle of the fireplace in the gîte.

Life in the Vouvray gîte

It was very pleasant, and I was glad we rented it for two weeks in June 2001,
after staying there for just one week in Oct. 2000.

This was one of the bedrooms — the one Walt and I slept in. It was comfortable. The Vélux skylight window was a good feature. It let hot air out so sleeping was comfortable. The other bedroom had a double bed. I don't even remember how that room was decorated. Cheryl seemed to like it, and so did Charles-Henry after I took her to Paris and I drove him to Vouvray to occupy it for our second week.

The furniture was pretty nice, I thought. And so was the bathroom, which separated the two bedrooms.

As I said before, we cooked meals for ourselves in the gîte's kitchen. That was more economical than eating two meals a day in restaurants. Lunch out; dinner in. One day we bought a leg of lamb (un gigot d'agneau) and roasted it in the oven. We sauteed some new potatoes. It was all very simple, and it was delicious. The leftovers made for good lamb sandwiches over the following days. We had no trouble finding good bread and wine to have with it.

The Vouvray gîte again

Most of the Vouvray photos I've posted until now were ones that I took in September and October of 2000. These today are some that I took in June 2001, when the weather was summery and not autumnal. We could open up the house and let the warm air in. We could relax outside and have meals outside. (Sightseeing is hard work.)

As you can see, there was a huge tree that gave us and the house some shade for part of the day. In the photo on the right above you can see that we had a big green front yard as well as the gravel terrace right in front of the house. All this, and the center of the village with all its shops was just a 10-minute walk away.

After a week there, Cheryl want to go to Paris for her second week in France. She and I drove up to Paris and met up with Charles-Henry, who had arrived in Paris for the summer. He and I drove up to Rouen drove for a night or two with friends there, and then CHM and I drove down to Vouvray, where Walt had stayed, alone, over the weekend. He wanted to watch some of the tennis matches that were being played at Roland Garros in Paris. It was a great vacation. BTW, the photo on the right above is another view of the Vouvray gîte owner's house.

Vouvray : more heighborhood pictures

The big house in the photos below was where the gîte owner lived. I'm sorry we didn't get to see the interior.
In the larger photo on the left below, that's our friend Cheryl.

Vouvray 2000 — a walk around the neighborhood

We arrived in Vouvray and checked into our gîte late one afternoon in early October 2000. We were pretty exhausted and jet-lagged after an 11-hour flight to Paris from San Francisco and then a four-hour drive from CDG airport, northeast of Paris, to Vouvray, about 150 miles to the southwest.That means you have to cope with some Paris traffic.

That evening, we got something to eat (can't remember what) and decided that the next day we wouldn't drive anywhere. We'd just walk around the town and get the lay of the land. And have a nice lunch somewhere.

Vouvray is a wine village (pop 3,000) where fine white wines — sparkling and still; sweet, semi-sweet, and dry — are produced. It's not a prettied-up place. Producing wine is agricultural and quasi-industrial. It's interesting to see. (The Champagne region is like that too, by the way.)

Another feature of the village is that it has quite a few troglodyte houses (cave dwellings), like the one on the right below. We took our cameras with us on our walk that first day. When we got back to the gîte, Sue said she was going to have to find a place to buy some more film. She hadn't expeced Vouvray to be so picturesque.

Un gîte à Vouvray

It was almost exactly 24 years ago that Walt and I rented a gîte rural in the wine village called Vouvray for a week-long stay in France. Little did we suspect that our Loire Valley trip would be a turning point in our lives. We were both still working in California at that point. After the week in Vouvray, a famous wine town, we spent a week in Champagne and in Normandy with French friends, and then we spent a week in Paris to wrap up the three-week vacation.

We had asked a California friend if she would like to come to France with us on that trip. She said yes, so we found this small two-bedroom house to rent. It turned out to be very comfortable and the price was right. Sue, who I had met in Paris in 1975, spent the second week of her vacation traveling down in the Pyrénées. Then she came and spent the third week of her vacation with us in Paris, where we rented an apartment in the Marais neighborhood.

The gîte in Vouvray was convenient because we could easily walk into the center of the village, where there were shops, grocery stores, cafés, and restaurants. The weather turned out to be nice. Evenings, we cooked our own meals in the kitchen at the gîte and planned what we would do the next day.

We liked this gîte so much that we decided to rent it again in June 2001, that time for two weeks. Another California friend, Cheryl, came with us. She stayed a week in Vouvray, and then I drove her to Paris, where she wanted to spend the second week of her vacation. Cheryl, who passed away a few years ago, spoke good French and had lived in Paris for a year in the 1970s. She wanted to relive her Paris experience. In Paris, I picked up Charles-Henry and he and I drove up to Normandy and then down to Vouvray, where he stayed for four or five days.

Le Château de Valmer (3)

Here's a little bit of text in French that talks about the history of Valmer. I grabbed it off of Valmer's web site. Here's a link to that site, and you can get it in English too if you want.

Selon la tradition, le Château de Valmer aurait appartenu à Charles VII. Les terrasses, les douves et la chapelle troglodytique ont été bâties au début du XVIème siècle.

Les constructions actuelles – le portail, les bâtiments de communs, le Petit Valmer - datent de 1640 et sont l'œuvre du Sieur Thomas Bonneau, conseiller du Roi Louis XIII.

Etabli sur un éperon rocheux dominant la vallée de la Brenne sur des coteaux calcaires, le domaine de 300 hectares marie un vignoble renommé, des jardins en terrasses Renaissance, des terres cultivées et des bois aux arbres bicentenaires.

Le Château de Valmer (2)

Valmer was built in the Italian-Renaissance style in the middle of the 16th century. Here's what it looked like before it was destroyed by fire in 1948. Thanks to Wikipédia for the photo. The building you see in my photos above was built in the 17th century and is called le pavillon Louis XIII. It and other buildings on the site survived the 1948 fire.

Valmer was (and still is) famous for its Italian-style terraced gardens, according to the Wikipédia article. There are seven terraces perched on a hillside 30 meters (100 feet) high, covering about a hectare (2.5 acres) of land in all. At the bottom of the hill, there's a 2.5 acre vegetable garden. If you are having a hard time wrapping your mind around all that... well, join the club.

My photos here date back to springtime in 2006.