second day in the loire valley

Daylight savings time happened to be this weekend, so while we thought we'd be getting a reasonable amount of sleep (breakfast at 9? oookay!), no. We were up early in the fog (it rained the whole weekend) and got on the bus, which drove us to the town of Bourré (600 people). (Interestingly enough, bourré is also rather impolite slang for "drunk.") This is not Bourré, but one of any number of identical tiny towns that we drove through.



Anyway, the point of going to Bourré was that it has a champignonière, a place where mushrooms are grown. The region of the Loire is full of these rocks called tuffaut, incredibly soft white rocks, essentially chalk; and the towns near the quarries are maybe 30% underground. All of the houses back up onto the hills, and behind them the garages and studies and sometimes even whole houses are cut into the rock. The champignonière was in a system of underground tunnels (200 km) that used to be a tuffaut quarry. Now I have a lot of pictures of mushrooms. Oyster mushrooms:



Yellow oyster mushrooms:



I forget the name of these mushrooms, blue somethings:



And an underground town sculpted out of tuffaut:



The rationale they gave us for the underground town was, "since the buildings made out of tuffaut" (most of the buildings in the area, including some chateaux) "deteriorate quickly, the underground town was made to show future generations how they were constructed." I tend to believe that the real reason was something that more closely resembled "we are a town of 600 people whose main industry is mushroom-growing, and not even the hallucinogenic kind; so we gotta do something to get the tourist dollars, right?"

After Bourré, we got back in the bus and headed to the chateau of Chenonceau. Before the chateau itself, we had lunch and wandered a bit:





The original chateau belonged to a banker to the government, and nothing of it remains except one tower. Caught embezzling, the banker lost his chateau, and the king (Henri IV, I think?) took over the property. He demolished the chateau and built a new one over the water, which he gave to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. Diane had it for a while, until the king's death, when the king's wife, Catherine de Medicis, forced Diane to trade with her for another chateau, an ugly and blatantly inferior one high up in the mountains.



Chenonceau is made of tuffaut--you can see how white it is. It's unfortunate we weren't there on a sunny day, because it would be beautiful. It's built entirely over the water except for a tower far off to the right that was part of the original chateau, and it has formal gardens (one by Diane de Poitiers and one by Catherine de Medicis).







The area over the bridge is really just one long room, the gallery, which was used as a hospital during World War I.



Chenonceau also has a fully-equipped kitchen in the basement (from the early 20th century).



That's the tower from the first chateau (now, predictably, the gift shop).





Chenonceau was lovely, but man, if only the weather had been better and it would have been gorgeous.