I have no idea where I should begin on this post. I feel like so much has happened in the last week or so, and it is already hard to remember all the details. I guess I could start off with what happened the most recently. On Saturday, most of the Davidson group participated in an excursion with the Institut de Touraine that went to two chateaux. After meeting at the bus at 8:30 am in the morning, the group of maybe 40 students and Dufresne (professor extraordinaire), the bus drove for about an hour to reach Cheverny. This castle was very much cool, but the adventurous nature of us college students craved for more. What we found was this: hunting dogs galore! They were at once adorable, and at the same time depressing. For the most part, these dogs were not very young (puppies), and they had sad, droopy eyes. They also smelt terrible. It was kind of like a mixture of dog bath and poop. Weird. In a bad way. But the amount of interest the dogs had in all of the people was so cute. Plus, they were dogs, which are awesome, and helped me get some dog back into my life.
This was the most exciting part of the visit to Cheverny for me, so heading back to the bus was not to bad. Back in my seat with about -3inches of space between my knees and the seats in front of me, we headed to Blois for lunch. I packed a pique-nique so I wouldn't need to buy a sandwich, but when we got there, our group headed to find a boulanger for either a sandwich for lunch, or a pain au chocolat for dessert. After picking up our supplies, we just kind of wandered through some streets and found a big staircase. Of course, we needed to know what you could see from the top, so we made our way up and found ourselves at a great lunch eating spot. It overlooked the Saturday morning market, and provided a good table for my lunch consisting of a ham and butter sandwich (yes, that is a popular thing, and when I told my family that I made a sandwich without butter last time they sort of freaked a little), a clementine, compote (applesauce in a pouch, but a little different, and better), coca, and little cookie things. Since we had over an hour before we needed to be back at the bus, our group made our way down to the river. It was pretty big, so we said, "Why not cross this huge bridge?" Once across, we could a lot of Blois, including the church next to which we parked the bus. With about 15 minutes until departure, we thought it might be a good life choice to head back across the bridge, up the hill through the town, and back to the bus. Having a tall steeple to guide us back, it didn't take too long, so with a couple minutes left, we sat down in the cathedral for a few minutes. Yes, we sat down in the cathedral instead of just going to find the bus. In retrospect, maybe not the best way of doing that. With our feet a little rested, we walked back behind the church to where the bus was parked. But it was gone! And there was nothing where a building used to be. What happened? Turns out we went to the wrong church. So two minutes past the time we were supposed to be back, we start our journey across a new part of town to hopefully find the bus before Dufresne gets upset. Blake, being the good guy he is, asked a man where the church (which Quincy remembered the name I believe) and he helped guide us in the general direction. It turns out we weren't terribly far from the church, and Dufresne even said that he never gets mad because of lost people. Good to know for future excursions. So finally, we got back to the bus.
After a pretty short ride, we arrive on the property of Chambord. To get in, you must drive through a gap in a wall surrounding the land that is 33km long. They made the wall to keep critters in when they do "la chasse" aka go hunting. Chambord is amazing. It is huge, looks really cool, and has less security measures, maybe because it is something like 20,000 m² in 427ish rooms. Technically, the public can see a number of rooms that is significantly smaller. As I mentioned earlier, we are a pretty adventurous group. The start of our adventures was in a small yellow room adjoining the room that I called dibs on for my future bedroom. In this room were a few little trinkets, but also a brown door. *Cue dramatic music* Upon further investigation, it was discovered that this door was closed, but because of the way they made the lock, it was possible to undo with my just fingers. So, with me being nervous about my first time, I got Blake to go in to see what was there. I stood guard by the almost closed door, and when he came back, all I heard was "There's stairs." This definitely peaked my curiosity. As I slipped behind the door during a brief period of time when nobody else was in the room, I glanced at a staircase leading upwards, to who knows what. Well, I do. As do Blake, Erin, Mary, and Jane. This staircase led up to what seemed to be some sort of office. It was a series of three rooms. The first was empty, with a good amount of light coming from the window. The second, however, had no light, and was filled with very random objects. Across the room, one could see two posters of human skeletons, providing an ample amount of fear for us adventurers. The third room was similar to the first, just with those posters. As we went back down the stairs to find the rest of the group, Blake and I got stuck. There was nobody to tell us when to go out of the room, and we could only see through a very tiny crack between the door and wall. After a minute or two of waiting for 3 guys to leave, we decided to just hope they didn't care, and as Blake opened the door, they headed out of the room, never seeing us come in. It was absolutely perfect timing. After showing the room to the others, we continued our tour of the chateau. Much to our dismay, pretty much every door was locked. In one room, we may or may not have used a paperclip and swiss army knife to try and pick a lock we thought was simple, but we were unsuccessful in our endeavor. After a long period of bad luck, we went up some stairs to a level of the castle with a little gate barring our passage to the unknown. I had tried to push it when I first saw it, but when I saw some of the others (not in the LOST sense) walking around the balcony, I knew that I just needed to push harder. I managed to open the gate, and what lied behind was both amazing and absurd. First, we encounter a staircase that leads both up and down. Which direction to choose? Up of course, it is always a contest to see how high up in the castle you can get. Turns out, this only led to a locked door much more complicated than the last, so Paisley, Blake, and I took a picture in front of the door to remember our accomplishment. There left only one possibility: go down, down as far as you can. Only Blake and I were brave enough to complete the journey, so as our two wandering souls ventured downwards, we had some good bro-bonding time. At every level, there was a door that opened up to the side, with a series of rooms. All of these rooms seemed to be getting remodeled with new flooring, and the walls looked like dry wall getting painted. One opening led to another hallway with a wooden staircase, but apart from a light at the top, which made me really nervous because I thought someone would be there, that was it. So for those halls, nothing exciting. My biggest regret from our adventure was not going down a hallway that was finished, and appeared to be lined with offices or some type of small room, most of which had lights shining under the doors. At the end of the hall, there was some sort of staircase or new room which I wished we had looked at, but we did not want to get caught by someone. So we continued trekking down the stairs. Then all of a sudden, we made it. We reached the ground floor of this tower. Actually, we had to walk through a small passage first, then we were on the ground floor, behind a set of giant doors that might shelter vehicles at other times. There was another staircase here, but we didn't make it very far because we realized that we did not have much time left before we needed to get out of the castle. So we left. As we finished our tour of the castle, we found a room with a fire burning, helping us warm our bodies in such a frigid place. (Chateaux are cold because they are huge, don't have insulation, and are only heated with fires, so rooms without fires are just stone freezers)
All in all, I would say that Chambord is a pretty sick chateau, and now on the top of my list of favorite chateaux. My life in Tours is not quite as exciting as that day was, but always know that I am doing something new and fun, because, why not?
P.S. Sorry this took so long to post, I wrote almost all of it Monday before going to bed, and I lost my interent Tuesday, and this is my first time back on a computer. Hopefully I get it back soon because I actually did all my homework the other night because I had nothing else to distact me. Weird.
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