Monday, November 22, 2010

More Chateaus

After our wonderful stay at Chateau de la Bourdaisiere John and I headed out on the road again to spend the day chateau hopping. 
Our first stop was Chateau de Nitray which was this quaint little chateau with a vineyard too. We were the only ones there and the owners were so nice. We ended up watching a 20 minute film on making wine barrels because we couldn't say no, did I mention the video was all in French! :)



After that we went to Cheverny which was of course beautiful and as expected had impeccable grounds. 
Cheverny still allows for hunting on its grounds and keeps it's own hounds which were clearly marked :)
Most of the chateaus had really long driveways leading up to the main houses and they were always lined with trees. It created such a dramatic approach!
At Cheverny they offered tours through the grounds including a boat tour of the canals. What I found really interesting was that the tour guide said when the canals were built they imported Cyprus trees from Florida and Louisiana :)
After spending way too much time at Cheverny we headed on to our last chateau for the day. I'm not sure this one can really be called a chateau since it was really more like Disneyland for adults :) It was enormous!
We didn't have much time to spend at Chambord since we were trying to make it to Dijon for the evening. We picked a couple of rooms to go through but we probably only spent an hour or so here and clearly you could stay much, much longer!

I'll leave you with one more picture of an incredibly long driveway.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Our Very Own Chateau

For those of you who read my last post about spending the day at Chenonceau, I joked how could it get better than that, well here is how the day got better....
We drove up to this lovely little chateau where John had booked us a room for the evening. We actually got to stay the night in a castle!

I don't know if any of you remember Joe Millionaire but it was a reality tv show and it happened to be filmed here.
Le chateau de la Bourdaisiere, hard to pronounce but so lovely to look at :) There was even a little chapel on the grounds.
The chateau itself was beautiful but the gardens were unbelievable!
There was a really nice traditional garden and then when we stepped through this tiny little door we walked into the most amazing collection of dahlias. 
I was running around like a little kid! My mouth actually dropped open when I first stepped through the door :)
Our stay at the chateau got even better when we actually went to our room and saw that they had completely modernized bathrooms (on a side note, the bathrooms in France were probably my least favorite thing, especially the showers!).

The next morning we got up and had breakfast all by ourselves in a beautiful little room overlooking more of the chateau grounds and then headed out for more chateau hopping :)

PS - Please forgive the mess that the picture arrangement is. The format has changed and now I can't get them to all be formatted the same. It's driving me nuts!

Monday, November 15, 2010

Chenonceau

Ok, back to reliving, I mean summing up our Paris trip :)

Half way through, on Wednesday, John and I rented a car and drove a couple hours south of Paris to Tours. It was a little bit of an adventure driving through Paris but really not too bad. Once we got on the highway it was super easy to navigate since France has amazing signs pointing to any landmark you might want to see. 

Chenonceau was on the top of my list for our trip so I was super excited. It just happened to be a beautiful day on our drive through the countryside to get to Chenonceau so that made it even better :)
We did the entire audio tour through the chateau which was fantastic. If I could have a dream house it would definitely look like this. The setting over the river was beautiful!
And of course it wouldn't be a chateau in France without an amazing garden. How could you not love the ivy covered cottage.
 As we were finishing up our tour we happened to see hot air balloons, I don't think the day could have gotten any better!
Oh wait, it did......more on that later :)

Monday, November 1, 2010

Halloween Festivities

Before I get back to posting about the rest of our Paris trip I thought I'd take a moment to share a little of Halloween in NY :)
Halloween is THE holiday in NYC. Everyone gets dressed up and it lasts for days. This year people started partying on Thursday and the biggest party, the parade was on Sunday night. We didn't get a chance to see the parade last year so I really wanted to see it this year. As hard as we tried we never could get close enough to actually see anything. It was insanely crowded, at one point we were packed onto a street so closely I couldn't even raise my arms. Needless to say I didn't get any pictures :(

I can't really convey the level of crazy without pictures so I'm sharing some I found in an article online.
Awesome
Also awesome, a little crazy
Way past crazy into INSANE!

These are just a few from the article. You can check out more pictures here and here but beware, they get way more crazy (ok maybe not MORE crazy than the last one but they're certainly close)!