On Saturday we did a day trip to the Loire Valley. This is a region famous for its chateaus and wine.\u00a0 Our tour guide, Simon, made it an exceptional experience. He was very informative, but also a lot of fun to spend the day with.<\/p>\n
The other person on our tour, was an incredible Aussie lady, Lynette, who was doing a two month tour of Europe by herself. Oh and by the way, she\u2019s 70. She said she hadn\u2019t been to New Zealand yet because she was saving that trip for when she is \u201ctoo old to manage the 24-hour flight to Europe.\u201d\u00a0 An inspiring lady\u2026now we will tell ourselves to think of Lynette when getting frustrated with international travel.<\/p>\n
Our first stop was Chateau de Chenonceau, which if you look at our pictures, you will see was incredibly grand. The king gave this chateau to his favorite mistress. When he came to visit, he enjoyed her company while the queen stayed in separate quarters at the chateau.\u00a0 We found it interesting that the queen was a teenager, and the mistress was twenty years older than the king (go king!)<\/p>\n
Our next stop was Les Caves Duhard Cellars, which is not a winery but a very small wine storage facility.\u00a0 We were given a guided tour of the caves and had a beautiful picnic lunch overlooking the Loire River. Here we were surprised to learn that the red wines can only be stored for 40 years, but the whites forever. We always thought red wines lasted longer than whites, but apparently it depends on the type of grape. They had white wines dating back to 1874, and the one we tried wasn\u2019t bad (just kidding we didn\u2019t get to try that one, but we did get to try a 1975 red).<\/p>\n
Another thing we found interesting was that in France they are not allowed to water their vineyards because this would be considered altering the terroir.\u00a0 In other words, unlike the US, the outcome of the wine varies considerably year to year depending on rainfall.<\/p>\n
Next we visited the charming little town of Amboise, the Amboise Chateau Royal, and Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s house, Chateau du Clos Luce.\u00a0 Supported by the king, Da Vinci spent the last three years of his life here dreaming up such concepts as the first automobile, the swing bridge, and the flying machine.<\/p>\n
There are 300 chateaus in the Loire, so this is definitely a place you could come for an extended visit. We enjoyed getting a small taste of life in the Loire during our stay in Paris.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Saturday we did a day trip to the Loire Valley. This is a region famous for its chateaus and wine.\u00a0 Our tour guide, Simon, made it an exceptional experience. He was very informative, but also a lot of fun to spend the day with.
\nThe other person on our tour, was an incredible Aussie lady, Lynette, who was doing a two month tour of Europe by herself. Oh and by the way, she\u2019s 70. She said she hadn\u2019t been to New Zealand yet because she was saving that trip for when she is \u201ctoo old to manage the 24-hour flight …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":278,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wearereallydoingit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wearereallydoingit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wearereallydoingit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wearereallydoingit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wearereallydoingit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wearereallydoingit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":280,"href":"https:\/\/wearereallydoingit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions\/280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wearereallydoingit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wearereallydoingit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wearereallydoingit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wearereallydoingit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}