Day 6: Tours - Orleans

I'm halfway through! Both by distance and by daycount (starting to have problems counting the latter...). Thus, it's time to celebrate - and as I can't bring anything, I do it with a massive dinner. :-)

Today has also been a day of "hypertourism", but a late yesterday and headwind today reduced marching speed to 25 km/h. The heat, however, has remained high; maximum reading on the handlebar has been 39 degrees both days. Today has also challenged my patience a little, with seriously bumpy roads for about 10 kilometres of the last 20: imagine someone stretching the asphalt so that it breaks every five metres, and the tires bre so hard that you feel every little piece of gravel that you roll over... You just don't want to go there, especially not after eight hours of bicycling and sightseeing castles...

Speaking of castles, or chateaux as I belive even the English put it, it has been an amazing experience to visit all those castles! Each and every one can easily take up a whole day, so it's obvious that I've just skimmed the surface. Nevertheless, I dear to promote a couple of favourites: first and topmost comes Chambord - a massive and impressive castle with large exhibitions as well as other cultural events, surrounded by an enormous property (read: forest). Chambord was by far the chateaux with the most tourists, and I even think I heard some other Norwegians there - a rare event this late in summer. Second, Chaumont was surprisingly pleasing despite it's very anonymous location - both in terms of exteriour and interior, but also as a place with a lot of other cultural events (in which I did not take part). Then comes the chateaux in Saumur and the castle in Angers. Both fortresses, though Angers more than Saumur, and impressive by the vastness of the property thus contained within the castle walls. Saumur has the finer castle, whereas Angers has the more impressive defense - not to mention it's insanely large tapestry. After those, the gardens in Villandry are impressive. I didn' get there in time to see the interior, but going through the gardens alone would take days. Then comes Rigny Usse, with it's incredible openness - you could walk around almost everywhere, although they had closed off certain areas. What made it even cooler, was that it is actually in use - I suppose that applies to the parts not open to the public. Ambois did not make it beyond average in this setting, and blois is not in this scoring as I didn't find it worth spending time (and money) there when Chambord was next on my list. That concludes my short and slightly left-handed evaluation of the eight castles I've visited the last two days.

Time to get some sleep and recover before I continue with the last half - starting with a visit to Sancerre...