"There's Paris, and There's the Rest of France"

...or so a wise friend of mine recently said to me.  And it's true.  While Paris is lovely, the countryside is a beautiful breath of fresh air (literally- if anyone's urinating outdoors, there's enough open space for it to waft in another direction.  Cramped metro platform, not so much).  And wow, were AH and I in desperate need of  green grass, pumpkins, and a few scattered barnyard animals.

Have you ever seen that old vaudeville act where someone spins a bunch of plates on top of poles, and every time they get one going, they have to go tend to another before it crashes and fall?  Yes, AH and I have been doing that, except we are both clumsy, and mostly we've ended up with broken plates.  Broken, expensive plates.  And stitches from where we sliced ourselves picking up shards of broken plates.

In case you're in any sort of suspense, we are fine now, everything has (more or less) settled down to something resembling as much of a normal life as we ever have.  But to give a quick recap, in the past few weeks we have: flown in and out of New York for a wedding (yeah!), had to temporarily pack up and move out of our apartment (boo!), had mercy taken on us by people who barely know us and let us sleep in their apartments (yeah!), tried to get things done at the prefecture, aka The Place That Convinces Me That Ye Olde Catholics Were Right About Purgatory (boo!), AND used our homelessness as an excuse to visit Tours (yeah!) but almost didn't get down due to a train strike (boo!) because an SNCF worker got stabbed (double boo!), thus we were stuck in Gare Austerlitz for FIVE HOURS (extra boo, but not as much boo as when that guy got stabbed!).

And so it is the next to last part that I would like to focus on (the part where we went to Tours, not the part where someone got stabbed), because it was such a lovely little holiday in the midst of a total clustercluck. We are lucky enough to know someone who lives and studies in Tours, has an adorable apartment with a fouton, and (extra yay!) speaks French and thus is an invaluable travel buddy.  AH and I, not generally excel spreadsheet type planners on the best of occasions, were in an especially unprepared haze of uselessness.  Luckily, though, our lovely Tour Guide Barbie is not only knowledgeable but also imbued with a healthy sense of adventure.  So when we arrived at Gare de Tours at noon to discover that there was no train to Villandry (our chosen destination) until 2 o'clock, we were all (miraculously, even me) up for taking a 12:30 to the little town of Savonierre, which we knew was vaguely in the area of where we wanted to end up.

We were prepared for the fact that Savonierre was probably not a well-connected hotspot.  We were correct:

This, my friends, was the train station.  No ticket machine. No maps.  No buildings.  This was the extent of the amenities of the Savonierre train station:

We did pass a pleasant half hour here eating the spoils of our morning boulangerie outing (carbs, cheese, carbs, cured meat, and chocolate). After lunch, we consulted the GPS on my phone to get a rough idea of where we were heading, and off we trekked, garnering confused looks from locals as we went.  I can only imagine what it would be like to be driving down a road in your little rural town and see three strangers, two of whom are photographing this:

Yup, those are snails.  I was fascinated.  But I can imagine that the locals' reactions were something akin to what mine every time I see groups of Japanese tourists photographing the cement corn fields in my hometown.  

It turned out to be a lovely, invigorating, 4 km walk.  At times we weren't exactly on what you might call a "path meant in any way for pedestrians," but eh, we lived to tell the tale.  And after our first stretch of country road, we came upon what we guessed to be downtown Savonierre (our guess was population: 200):

Lovely, no?  A small river town tucked away in the Loire, with back yards and buildings that looked like they were created on a sound stage somewhere.  At one point, AH spied a set of stairs leading up the hillside, and we agreed that we would investigate.  Alas, they were in someone's backyard, and I don't think trespassing is one of those things you can use your ignorant tourist card on (at least when the object of your desire is behind a locked fence).  But we did see friendly critters, like this fellow here:

Don't you just want to snorgle him?  Tour Guide Barbie did not, as she has an utter fear of almost all living, non-human creatures, but I was a fan.  The town was actually teeming with critters.  I got really excited when I saw a coop full of what looked like mourning doves, and was getting ready to take a picture, when I saw an old French woman in an apron at her back door, slowly drying a dish and giving me a witheringly disapproving glare as only an old French woman can do.  I tucked my camera away and quickly moved on.

About 20 more minutes of country road and we arrived relatively unscathed at our destination: Chateau Villandry.  This being France, and Villandry being a chateau, I'm sure you know the drill by now: breath-taking gardens, opulent interiors, paintings that cost more than what I will make in many years put together. And I thoroughly enjoyed myself, as did AH and TGB.  AH and I also enjoyed Chateau Amboise and the nearby Clos Luce (where Leonardo da Vinci spent the last three years of his life; full-scale models of his inventions await visitors in the garden) the next day. 

But somehow, it was an unscripted adventure through the countryside (complete with snails, sheep and disapproving old French women) that I think I'll be telling stories about for a long time to come.