The Loire Valley, Part I

If you miss watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the Loire Valley is the place for you.  There are 1,001 chateaux--many built over medieval fortresses--and they are a sparkling example of French architecture, artfully manicured gardens, and blatant one-upmanship.  If you go with your children and you don't lose them inside the chateaux, you will lose them once they see the labyrinth signs and go running for the hedges.  Don't worry.  Depending on their age, they'll find their own way out, or they'll get to the center platform and scream for you in English which makes them easy to weed out from the others.

Due to rich hunting grounds, the Hundred Years War, the presence of French Kings, and the need for ministers, court, and various hangers-on to sleep near royalty, the Loire Valley hosted the "Who's Who Among the Upper French Crust" (this would be a hard crust, of course) for over two centuries.  And you can almost hear a particularly annoying aristocrat say, "It's so tiresome to always have hummingbird tongue on hand. One never knows when the King will pop by."  Now, depending upon who you are and how you got your money, the King popping by wouldn't necessarily be a good thing, as Gilles Bertholot found first hand.

Gilles Bertholot, the King's notary and secretary, acquired the Chateau of Azay-le-Rideau in 1510, and set-about redecorating it with funds his relative, the Superintendent of Finance, embezzled from the King.  After this relative was executed, King Francois I popped by to compliment Berthelot on his fine house, and his meaning was clear.  Berthelot fled, and the chateau was given to the King's buddy, Antoine Raffin, whose descendants lived there, presumably rent free, until the 18th Century.

So this got me thinking:  you could save a lot of money living with your parents until you got married.  Can you imagine how much money your entire family could save by living in the King's house for 200 years? 

Here's a picture of what free housing looked like in 1537 (the Chateau of Azay-le-Rideau):

Francois I not only gave free housing to Antoine Raffin, but he also room and boarded Leonardo da Vinci in the Chateau du Clos Luce in Amboise, France.  The only requirement for Leonardo was to have a daily conversation with the King and to sleep in a room with a communicating door to the King's sister (actually, the latter wasn't a requirement, but it was the reality we discovered during our tour).  My husband says there's nothing to this.  "Leonardo was far too old to carry on with the King's sister," he said.  But I admit my eyebrows went up when I immediately didn't find a lock on either side of the door.  It wasn't until he said, "Most historians agree that Leonardo was gay," that they went back down.  And my next question was, "So, he had a view of Francois' Royal Chateau from his window AND the King sat next to his bed when he died?"  If my husband didn't say, "STOP!" in words, his expression surely did.

In the basement are scale models of many of Leonardo's inventions and even more interesting for the kids were the full scale replicas of his swinging bridge, tank, paddle boat, repeating gun (pictured below), etc. 

We visited for three hours, and we could have happily stayed for many hours longer had my friend's son not imploded somewhere along the tour (probably near the cat sleeping on da Vinci's death bed--he doesn't like cats).  Since this was during the rare astrological aligning of the stars which ushered in good behavior from my son, I just looked with empathy upon his parents, thinking how sad it was that they just couldn't get along. 

(Above and Below): The Chateau du Clos Luce

(Below): The room where da Vinci died.  Note:  House owner's cat sleeping on da Vinci's bed.

(Below): The view from da Vinci's room.  The Royal Chateau is on the hill in the distance.

(Below): Full-scale models of da Vinci's repeating gun in the foreground, and rotating UFO-style tank in the background. 

The Royal Chateau of Amboise's St. Hubert Chapel (pictured below) is said to house Leonardo da Vinci's body--though this is disputed.  Only 1/5th of the original chateau survived after one of Napoleon's men ordered its systematic destruction, and luckily for da Vinci, they hadn't gotten to the Chapel before the British got to Napoleon.

Charles VIII died at the chateau in April 1498 at age 28 after bumping his head on a door frame on his way to a tennis match.  This is what the pamphlet says, but I'm suspicious since I've seen very few lethal door frames in my life.

(Below):  Leonardo da Vinci's tomb inside the St. Hubert Chapel

(Above and Below):  What is left of the Royal Chateau, Amboise

(Above and Below): Interior pictures of the Royal Chateau, Amboise

 © 2012 Nicole Wirth

Author of:  Letters to Salthill 

The Kids

If you spend nine weeks traveling with your kids, you're going to see a lot of changes in their behavior and your own.  You'll need your camera and notebook to capture these developmental breakthroughs and you may need a lot of aspirin and/or alcoholic beverages to ease the pain of the transformation.

Before we left the US, the kids spent most days fighting with us and each other over IPODs, video games, computers, and TV time.  Setting rules such as no use during daylight hours/school days; one hour of outside play equals 15 minutes of electronics time; and bad grades/behavior equals no electronics privileges at all was a full time job.  But on the positive side, dangling an IPOD over the kids' heads could stop their bad behavior mid-meltdown.  So, I must admit that I was nervous taking the kids and leaving the electronics for nine weeks.  I might have said in half-jest that we should put the boy on Ritalin first, but in truth we found that you can actually exercise the crazy out of your kids given enough time and vertical space.  It just requires more exercise and patience than any adult should rightfully have since asking them to race each other to that tree and back only works so many times.

I've mentioned before that the boy cited a lack of electronics when he repeatedly read aloud from the Amtrak cafe car menu on the way to the airport.  By the time we reached Switzerland, he actively tried to either embarrass us or get sent home by loudly asking why the Swiss women weren't making dinner for their husbands instead of hiking--he would only say this if he thought there were English-speakers within ear shot.  By Vienna, he wouldn't stop asking in an "outdoor voice" if they had moved Mecca in response to the ample display of head scarves.  Having no electronics to restrict nor bedroom to send him to meant that we could either try clever diplomacy (this is not my skillset), beating him like a Persian rug (I must admit I was tempted), or restricting food.  So, the boy went without dessert most meals and sometimes without dinner at all....and that was after he ended his hunger strike.  

I know I've mentioned the hunger strike before, but I may not have mentioned the why.  The boy knows how to order food in German, but he refused to speak anything but English for the first three days.  He also told us he would rather go hungry than eat anything that didn't look like his grandmother's cooking, and there is nothing in eastern Switzerland/western Austria which resembles mashed potatoes and fried chicken.  At a restaurant in Switzerland, the boy did nothing to hide his distaste for the menu before I declared he would have nothing.  So, the good humored waitress set a completely empty plate in front of him when she brought out food for the rest of us.  If you want to know the German phrase for "Sorry about the boy," we have it memorized.

After two days of eating nothing but the trail mix in his backpack, the boy threatened to call Swiss Social Services if we didn't buy him pizza, to which we responded that we had no fear of this at all since he refused to speak German. 

After the third day, the temptation of gelato was too much and he also couldn't resist the schnitzel his father ordered for lunch.  Upon ordering his own plate of schnitzel, he officially ended the hunger strike once and for all.  By the time we left Feldkirch, the boy was asking for schnitzel for every meal, including breakfast....in German, and both we and the restaurants were shocked.

So, breaking a kid's spirit is a tough job, but one made much easier by the natural desire to both eat and live indoors.  In fact, after a week of camping in the Alps, the act of booking a guest house for two nights caused the boy to grab his sister in a bear hug and jump up and down.  My husband and I looked at each other and smiled not only because we now had proof that the boy loved his sister, but we also had the threat of camping to hold over his head.

So, we achieved a hard-fought victory, and with bad behavior resulting in a date with the tent, the kids stopped slapping each other in the back seat or stabbing each other with the wooden swords we not-so-wisely bought them in Neuschwanstein.  They also stopped using common insults like "jerk" or "moron", but this is when the children achieved a victory of their own.  As soon as the boy realized that any word sounds like an insult given the right volume and inflection, he taught his sister to repurpose common words and phrases as curse words.  The real low point came when the girl called the boy "A freshly paved road" and the boy responded, "Well, you're a red Mitzubishi!"  And as annoying as it was to hear the girl yell, "Mom, tell him to stop calling me a chicken nugget!" there was no way to punish the boy without looking like an unstable tyrant.  There was also no way to yell at him when he began calling everyone "Bob," or when he convinced his sister that a leper was a grown up leprechaun.  I finally threw up the white flag when he responded, "She was only being nice," to the question, "Didn't you hear her screaming or say she didn't want you to pick her up?" 

Despite the annoyance of being outwitted by the children, watching them conspire against us in the back seat seemed strangely heartwarming.  Watching them look out the window at the European landscapes without headphones in their ears or game systems in their hands was also inspiring.  I asked once or twice what they were thinking about, but this was a closely guarded secret. 

After a month away from home, the only real fighting ensued over books, yes, books (I may have to type that again because even I don't believe it), and they mostly spent their time coming up with games like who could throw their wooden axe (another ill-advised purchase) farthest; who could hold their hand in the ice cold fountain longest; who could bowl a rock down the pier farthest without it falling into the water; whether the boy could read his sister's mind by placing his hands on each side of her head, or a game they called "Infection"--one person has a water bottle that will infect another if stabbed with the bottle, but the other can stop the attack by throwing and hitting the attacker with their own empty water bottle.  At night, we played Tail Trail until we fell asleep and sometimes we played it in the car too. 

By Slovenia, the boy had stopped yelling "Man down" while running past his injured sister, and instead he carried her around most cities, hills, and trails whenever she became tired, or complained about her feet, ankles, or legs.  Most importantly, (and surprisingly) we were finally comfortable spending time with each other without the crutch of an electronic device.

(Below): Playing swords in Neuschwanstein



(Above):  Playing the water fountain game in Innsbruck

(Below): Preparing to play the water fountain game in Hallstatt

(Below): Playing the mind reading game in a cemetery in Vienna.

(Above): The boy carrying the girl around Lake Bled.

(Below): The boy carrying the girl around Florence.

(Below): The boy carrying the girl around France.

© 2012 Nicole Wirth

Author of:  Letters to Salthill 

Grotte de Niaux, Carcassonne, and Rocamadour, France

If you're wondering how you pronounce 2/3rds of the town names in the title of this post, I have to admit that I don't know even though I asked my friend numerous times to pronounce them before and after making my best attempts.  But what I've learned about my mouth is that there is no way any amount of practice will contort it to say most French words including "heureux" (happy).  I generally try a couple of times, then sigh and say "content" which is when my French friend rolls her eyes and says, "Oh Neekole.  You speak French like a Russian!"  This is true, but in order to deflect criticism, I'll tell you that my husband's pronunciation of anything French is much much worse than mine.  In fact, my daughter tries hard to walk her father through the pronunciation of basic phrases, but he can't manage to say "eau" without sounding like he's making fun of either the French language or a slow person.  In any event, no matter how you pronounce Niaux, or Rocamadour, you don't want to miss them.

We were only in Toulouse a few hours (12 to be exact) before our French friends decided that we risked becoming bored if we didn't travel to see something new, and since it's impossible to say, "We're just happy to see the inside of a house" without sounding like you're more interested in the rest of Europe than in your friend's homeland, we smiled broadly and said "oui" when they suggested we see prehistoric cave drawings in a town near the border with Andorra and Spain.  I won't tell you the expression on my kids' faces when we told them we would be leaving the big screen TV they knelt in front of and worshipped the night before, but you could almost see their souls reaching toward the yard as we backed out of the driveway.

If you see a map of prehistoric cave drawings, you will notice that most of the locations are in the south of France.  We had a couple of hours in the car to ponder why artists for 14,000 years have flocked to the same region.  Maybe it was the fields of wild flowers or the angle of the light off of wheat colored grass lands.  I'm sure there were no tax advantages to prehistoric artists, but you have to admit that something must be in the air when people from cave men to Van Gogh find inspiration in the same area of the same country.  We didn't determine an answer to this question by the time we arrived in Niaux since my son busily entertained our friends with third-person accounts of his "awesomeness".  In fact, suggestions that there is a picture of him in the dictionary next to the word "awesome" inspired amounts of laughter you don't normally associate with the French. 

The Grotte de Niaux
Lascaux is the most famous cave in France, but it is closed now in order to preserve the drawings.  You can see Lascaux II--a reproduction of the first--but it would be hard to get excited about seeing a reproduction of just about anything famous--which is why I've never been to a wax museum. The Grotte de Niaux is still open to the public, but you must make a reservation since the number of visitors are limited in order to reduce the effects of body heat within the cave.  This point you will have to take on faith since it's colder inside the cave than a late fall day and you'll probably be ill equipped to deal with this much cold in the middle of summer.  I was lucky that my son refused to wear his jacket on macho grounds and I was able to pretend it was just more convenient to wear the jacket than hold it in my arms.  If you go to Niaux (I think that may rhyme), also bring shoes with good grips since the moist rocks are incredibly slippery.

Almost as interesting as the expansive caverns, side tunnels, and drawings of bison, horses, ibex and deer were graffiti from as far back as the 1600s.  There was even more graffiti in the 1700s, but the most graffiti seemed to come from the following century.  It's important to note this so the next time you hear someone say that today's kids are going to hell in a hand basket, you can tell them that 19th century teenagers were no great shakes either.

Carcassonne
If you travel from Genoa, Italy to Toulouse via highway, Carcassonne will appear to the right like a less shiny vision of Camelot.  It is the largest fortress city in Europe boasting two sets of defensive walls-- the inner wall was built by the Romans and the outer wall dates to Medieval times.  It was a stronghold of the Cathars, but not strong enough when the Pope declared Cathars to be heretics and the town was sacked in 1209.  If you're wondering what one would have to say to be considered a heretic in the 1200s, declaring material goods evil, and recognizing only baptism as a sacrament would put your name firmly onto the "to be slaughtered" list.

Carcassonne is said to have gotten its name from an earlier siege when Charlemagne's troops circled, then tried to starve the town.  A woman named Madame Carcas (not the prettiest French surname) convinced the townspeople to catapult a well-fed pig at the troops which convinced Charlemagne that a people who could throw pork at their enemy after a lengthy siege could never be starved-out. 

So, the history of Carcassonne is both funny and disturbing, but the modern town takes the word "quaint" to a new level with winding narrow cobble-stoned roads and abundant stone-walled shops on both sides.  And as lovely as it is during the day, the town is even prettier at night with spotlights illuminating major architectural features like the stone walls, spires, and towers, and garden cafes serving typically delicious French food well into the evening.  In fact, if you're going to ask someone to marry you, you have a better chance of that person saying "yes" in a cafe in Carcassonne, than just about any other place in the world. 

Rocamadour
Rocamadour is another lovely town which you will find holding onto the side of a cliff for dear life.  This is the impression you get when you approach the town from a hillside road across the valley, and once you reach the valley, you may wonder why anyone would hang a town on a precipice instead of building it onto perfectly good flatland, but we probably don't invade neighboring cities in the US enough to appreciate that not only seizing the high ground, but holding it for the rest of your life might be a very good idea.

Rocamadour has been a pilgrimage site since the well-preserved body of a man named Zacheus, later known as Amadour was found in 1166.  Legend has it that Amadour entertained Jesus in his home before "moving to France" making his remains quite old when they were discovered.  As with much of history, who Amadour was and how old he is is the subject of much debate and you are as likely to posit as credible a hypothesis as anyone.  My theory is that he had a mother-in-law with bad knees so he moved to the hillside to get away from her.  To avoid the wrath of his wife, he pretended the move was solely based on a desire to build a chapel.  Later, other men flocked to the site in order to escape their mother-in-laws, and voila (as the French would say), a pilgrimage site was born.

(Below): Carcassonne

(Below): Rocamadour 

 

© 2012 Nicole Wirth
Author of:  Letters to Salthill 

Driving to France, and Tollways

It took eight hours to drive from La Spezia, Italy to Toulouse, France and it should be a crime to drive as fast as we did past Genoa, Monaco, Nice, Cannes, Aix-en Provence, Arles, Avignon, Nimes, and Montpellier. In fact, driving laws were probably broken--and tickets may still be en route--since speed cameras were added along the highway since the TomTom lady's latest software update. So, although she warned you in Austria every time you approached a speed camera, she doesn't know about the ones in France....and if you're driving eight hours with a sour stomach and the promise of a dear friend and a private bathroom at the end, you won't notice the prominent white radar signs (pictured below) announcing the cameras to citizens who may shutdown the roads with truck loads of rotten tomatoes if not given fair warning.



Below is a picture of Levanto, Italy which we saw from a bridge while traveling at about 130km (80 miles) per hour, and it clearly doesn't do the area justice. We also tried to take a picture of the sliver of Monaco we saw which consisted of a left-curving dark tunnel with blue and gold running lights. That picture didn't turn out at all--as one might have guessed even before my husband told me it was a waste of time. He took the picture anyway after I sighed and said he didn't need to....which was the only way I could guarantee he would.



Most of the day, we saw fields and the occasional hill, but nothing of the French Riviera which would have been really upsetting had we not seen it on our honeymoon over 13 years ago. What was more upsetting was the abundance of tolls which stopped our progress every five feet (slight exaggeration), and pushed our arrival time back by at least ten minutes each time. I tried to stay calm, but I couldn't help cursing the inefficiency of paying a toll, taking a ticket five minutes later, turning in the toll ticket within the hour, then paying another toll a few minutes after that.

My husband thought my railing about the toll inefficiency had less to do with the tolls, and more to do with missing a dear friend, and he was probably right because although you've heard the term, "No man is an island," you may not know that no family is an island either. After one month of interacting with locals using nothing more than body language and the vocabulary of a two year old, we were desperate to have a conversation that started with, "What do you think of" or "How is your father doing?" rather than "May I have". In fact, one month is the maximum our family could spend drifting from place to place without seeing the look of excitement on people's faces as we arrived or sadness as we drove away.

Traffic wasn't terrible until we hit Montpellier during rush hour, but it only amounted to about 11 miles of crawling before we sped-up again. We traveled on a Thursday, which is key, because something we learned early-on is that you never want to drive on the highways in France in the summer on a Saturday. Never. Really.

Toll Aside (avoid the below unless you plan to travel the European Highway System in the near future, or you have an unsurpressible urge to be bored to tears):

We visited three countries in Europe which required a toll sticker (called a "vignette" in all three countries) be purchased and affixed to the windshield before entering the country's tollway system: Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia. If you stop at a gas station near the border, you can get one without a problem even if you're in one country asking for another country's sticker. If you don't have a vignette stuck to your windshield (laying it on the dashboard is not good enough), you are in deep, deep......um....trouble when the police stop you. In Switzerland, we had no choice but to buy a yearly sticker; in Austria we bought a monthly sticker; and in Slovenia, we bought a sticker which was good for only a week. I can't recall the exact price, but it ranged from 20 to 30 Euros for each country which is money well spent when you realize you could be fined $200 for a failure to buy the sticker, depending on the country. The TomTom lady gives you the option to avoid the toll system, but don't try this without putting passengers in the back seat on a Dramamine IV drip.

In any event, a good guide book like Rick Steves' will have up-to-date information on vignette prices, procedures, and fines--in case you want to use the system without purchasing a vignette. It may also give you the proper translation for "I'm a foreigner and I really don't think I should have to pay for your roads," as well as "May I make one phone call to my lawyer before you take me into custody?" Now, I'm not sure that they'd actually arrest you, but it is my humble opinion that you should not risk it.

Although you pay to use the highway in Austria, you will pay an additional fee if you travel through the longer tunnels, and this brings me to an important point: If you are claustrophobic, or can imagine a circumstance where you could develop claustrophobia, or if there is even the slightest chance you may carry the claustrophobic gene, stay off the Austrian highways--especially the route between Brand and Reutte. The following is a slight exaggeration: we spent nearly 40% of our time in and out of tunnels on this route. The longest tunnel was about 21,000 feet and took three songs to traverse--one of which was a John Lennon song and I only mention this so you know how long that can take. It is also long enough to have a conversation about whether it was the tunnel between Italy and Switzerland or Italy and France where a major crash caused a raging fire and mass casualties a few years back. This is about the time you will notice the emergency exit signs which are green with a white cartoon man chasing an arrow.

Italy and France do not require you to purchase a vignette, but if you travel our route along the northwestern coast of Italy and the southeastern coast of France, have a dependable credit card and/or about 100 Euros at the ready for toll plazas in case the machine doesn't take your credit card which--as I mentioned in the previous post--happens 10 percent of the time.

© 2012 Nicole Wirth
Author of:  Letters to Salthill 

The Cinque Terre and Italian Roads

The Cinque Terre comprises five Italian coastal towns positioned between terraced hillsides and the sea and we sadly saw none of it except for the pictures we took from above (see below).  There are a few reasons for this:  First, we only had two days in the Cinque Terre before we were expected to arrive in Toulouse, France.  Second, there were no B&Bs or hotel rooms available when we attempted to book a few days before arriving (a harsh side-effect of a heretofore flexible schedule).  Third, although we stayed in La Spezia which is a short train ride to the southern-most town of the Cinque Terre (Riomaggiore), one of those days was my scheduled work day, and toward the end of that day I contracted food poisoning, or an illness very similar.

As I said in my last blog entry, I blame this illness on my husband since he jinxed me by remarking on how healthy all of us had been during our trip so far.  I also blame him because this is what wives do when they experience a pain which feels like it's crushing their pelvic bone--it's an evolutionary thing. 

So, the next day we left our hotel in La Spezia, but we still had time to use the family train tickets my husband purchased the day before.  However, although I was over the worst of the sickness, walking from the historic area to the free parking spot near the Arsenale put me into a cold sweat and I couldn't imagine walking to the train station, then stressing over train departure and arrival times before an eight hour drive to France.  Now, I don't want to sound like a wimp here.  In the States, we can drive eight hours in our sleep, but the roads in Europe take more out of a person than those in the US.  I'm not sure if it's because the roads transition from super sunlit coastal bridges to dark tunnels with an immediate jogging of the road one foot to the right, or if it's because of the tolls where your credit card doesn't work 10 percent of the time and you accidentally say to the attendant--who comes over when the cars behind you begin honking--"my card doesn't walk properly."  In any event, I was tired and queasy and if I couldn't make it to my own house or my mother's, I wanted to be in the home of a friend....who just happens to have a lovely guest bedroom with a perfectly good en suite bathroom in Toulouse.  So, I apologized to my husband a thousand times and said we could drive along the hillside road on our way north and dart down to a town or two if he saw fit.

Now, if you've ever been to or read about the Cinque Terre you know that the last sentence of the previous paragraph is madness!  All of the travel guides tell you to use the train at all costs, and part of you knows they're right, but you can easily delude yourself into thinking a road wouldn't be on a map if it wasn't passable, and in any event you need to redeem a small part of your trip.

If you've ever seen the TV series "Ice Road Truckers" during its Indian Himalayan Roadways Season, you already have a pretty good picture of the state of the roadways along the Cinque Terre.  In their defense, the trip was made worse by a landslide that forced us onto secondary roads--portions of which had fallen down the hill.  The mid-sized semi in front of us gave us some perspective though as it backed-up multiple times to clear the hairpin turns, and we were lucky not to encounter oncoming traffic during the most narrow or blinding turns, but things became interesting after the truck left the road, the road turned to gravel, and our car ran point for five cars behind us.  At this point, we did come across oncoming traffic--a Swiss car that spoke to us in French (for the first time) asking if the road was closed ahead.  I swear I know enough French to understand him, but I was too frazzled to respond in anything but English--and even that was halting and incoherent except when yelling "Shut up!" to the back seat. 

If you don't want to spend an hour getting to know first gear and the Hail Mary, I suggest you stay off any roads that would give you a view of the Cinque Terre.  Park in La Spezia like we did; don't eat what I did (although I have no idea what that was); take the train like the travel books and any sane person would tell you to do; then, spend the day leisurely hiking and eating your way through what all the guide books say is the single loveliest coastline in Italy. 

You may notice that the pictures below look remakably alike.  The dark versions are taken with my phone, the light versions are taken with my husband's expensive lens-changing camera.  We had a contest to see who could take the overall best picture during the trip and I think I won with my Florence photo of a statue reaching up to the Palazzo Vecchio, but we have yet to assemble our pictures in front of judges.  I'll post the finalists though and let you know who won....if it's me. :-)



(Above and Below:) Riomaggiore

(Above and Below): Manarola 

(Above and Below): Looking down toward Monterosso Al Mare

 © 2012 Nicole Wirth

Author of:  Letters to Salthill