Amboise : Les pieds dans l'eau

This morning, I'm back to normal. The Moderna side effects are gone for good, I hope.

And now Walt has an appointment next Thursday to get his booster shot.

    As you can see, there's a strip of land along the banks of the Loire river in Amboise, just below the château, that is used
as a parking lot. But when the river is rising (photo on the right), it wouldn't be wise to leave your vehicle down there.


    I think the photo just above on the left gives you a good feeling for how high the water had risen in early December 2003.
In the photo on the right, you can see the stairs that are built into the wall that protects the town from flooding
so that when the water is at normal levels people can climb down to the grassy river banks.


    On the left, here's an October 2004 close-up photo of one set of those steps down to river level.
On the right, the photo shows what such steps looked like from above in December 2003.

Loire levels by season

I slept peacefully, but when I got up this morning my left arm, into which the Moderna shot was administered yesterday morning, felt extremely sore. And my back and shoulders seemed unusually stiff. Sitting here in front of my laptop, I have watery eyes and a lot of congestion. I'm coughing. I just felt a distinct chill up and down my spine. Are these side effects from the Moderna vaccine, or am I just feeling my age? It's pretty cold outside (+3ºC), but the house is warm. With any luck, this will be a quiet day. It's Walt's turn to walk out in the vineyard with Natasha this morning. I'm planning to make a beef and broccoli stir fry for lunch. It's a quick and easy recipe.

This is what the Loire looked like at Amboise on the same July day when I took the photos at Blois that I posted yesterday. There's as much mud as water visible in the riverbed.

Here's what the bridge at Amboise looked like on a June day a few years earlier. Notice how much of the stonework is visible, and how much headroom there is under the bridge arches.

Here's the Amboise bridge on a sunny, cold December day (photos above and below) not long after we came to live here. A huge volume of water was moving down the Loire towards the river's mouth from its source about 450 miles distant.

In December 2003, the Loire rose 4.5 meters (nearly 15 feet) above its normal level. In 1856, it rose 8 meters (26 feet) above that level and big parts of the town were flooded.

I've been up for almost two hours now and I'm feeling about the same. Maybe it's time to lie down for a few minutes. My head aches and my shoulders are still very stiff. I'm not complaining, just reporting. Okay, moaning just a little.

The lazy Loire

As CHM mentioned in a comment yesterday, the Loire, France's longest river, flows pretty lazily in this part of France.
In some of these photos I took at Blois just two or three years ago, the Loire looks more like a marsh than a river.

This is a wide-angle shot of the right bank section of Blois. In mid-July, the river was very low.

One of the most striking sights in Blois is the Église Saint-Nicolas.
That's part of the town's château behind it, to the left.

The cathedral at Blois stands high on a hill above the business district and the old bridge.
Look at that gravely riverbed.

A Chaumont-sur-Loire slideshow

Here's a two-minute diaporama made up of a dozen photos of the village and château at Chaumont-sur-Loire that I've taken over the past 20 years. By car, Chaumont (pop. 1100) is on the Loire river about 20 minutes SW of Blois and the same distance NE of Amboise. It's also about a 30-minute walk from the train station in the town of Onzain on the opposite bank of the Loire river, so you can get there by train from Tours, Amboise, or Blois. On a sunny day, it would be a nice walk. You can read about Chaumont and its 15th-century château here.

Tomorrow is my day to get my Covid booster shot. It's about time. Walt is still waiting for the call from the pharmacy to set his appointment up. By the time the third shot kicks in, it will probably be about time for a fourth. Wouldn't a miracle — the Covid-19 virus vanishes from the face of the Earth, for example — be nice right now?