A CHATEAU & A CATHEDRAL

Cheverny & Chartres
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Last night while typing our blogs we kept referring to the brochures for information on the places we had been to visit. I said to Martha, that tomorrow we must take time to more carefully read these brochures while we are touring and not later in the day as I could see lots of things that we had missed while walking around inside these castles.

So today in each room of Chateau Cheverny we would look, take photos and then before we moved on read what the brochures said and I must say that we enjoyed this so much as it made us take more time to really understand what we were seeing.

Cheverny was built and decorated during the 1600s and is preserved as a family home. It has been in the Hurault family from the time of its construction, in fact the Hurault family still lives on the third floor of this chateau.

Of great interest to me was “The Tapestry Room” as it contained 5 Flemish tapestries woven in the 17th century from cartoons by the Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger (who is currently my favorite artist and whose work I have been finding in museums during our travels). He was renowned in his time for his popular scenes of daily life. Also we saw the building where the Mona Lisa picture was stored during the war years. If the weather had been better they did have some lovely grounds which we could have wandered around but….. due to the light rain that was falling we elected to find our way to Chartres where we would find a Cathedral to tour and our room for the night.

On our way to Chartres we also did a drive by of the Chateau in Chambord. Martha would have loved to tour this again but it is over 400 rooms with many stairs and I said that I need to save my energy for Fontainebleau tomorrow, so much to her dismay this was only a photo stop for us as we continued on to Chartres.

The Cathedral in Chartres was very interesting to see but it had a lot of construction work going on both inside and out that tended to take away from the views, but the lovely organ music that was being played gave the expanse of this huge church a warm feeling.

While we were traveling our roads today we kept seeing more and more fields of the yellow flowers that we originally thought were mustard seed. But nobody needs that much mustard…. We even stopped and Martha took pictures of me standing in the field as she said they reminded her of when they were here in late summer they would see fields and fields of sunflowers growing so pretty and yellow. A lovely lady next to the Cathedral answered our question… she heard us talking and asked where we were from…. When we said California and Florida she said that she was from Virginia but married a man from England and now lives there with him. We asked her about the fields of yellow….. she said they are Rape Seed… which is a cooking oil and would soon be ready for harvest….. so now we know