It's back to the froggy keyboard for me for another thrilling instalment that make the Lilliputians want to pig out on Arnie's Body Mass Builder so they can read the screen.
Some more learnings on the travels - I've learned that if you want to speak Italian, just add an 'Oh' onto nearly every word and for the French, make it a 'Say' or a 'Swah'. It's amazing how easy it all becomes...
To continue the tour of Tours; some of the chateaus that have been visited are truly mind-blowing. You could spend months looking at them and still not se them all. One thing that is evident is that they realised these things take time to build, so they planned that way.
One took over 200 years! Without the need to continually redocorate and remodel by royalty who had an eye for extravagance, this probably would have taken 10 years; but then that's not nearly as impressive.
My pick for the area is where Leonardo Da Vinci spent his final years at a quaint litle hamlet called Amboise. Not that that I'd call it a hamlet to their faces unless I was barrelling down the on-ramp to the plane, nonetheless I wouldn't be calling it any more significant in size than it seemed to be 250 years ago.
Back to Leo.
He kept the Mona Lisa with him until he died, after spending the last three of his twilight years in his peaceful surroundings. Quotes of 'How's the serenity?' were to fall on uncivil ears...
Something about the ML I didn't quite get. It was a commissioned painting by some fellow in Italy who I would have thought retained ownership upon its completion, however that seemed not to be the case. Leo kept it and then it was bequethed to some other dude then sold to the King of France (methinks it was like 'You want to sell me this painting, don't you little man.) who promptly treasured it and started writing conspiracy theories about it.
The attraction of the grounds where Leo lived and died was mostly that the great man was there himself, but also there were re-creations of his drawings as actual completed units. This was pretty cool, in particular some of the complex engineering behind certain of his inventions that we still use to some significant degree today.
They make good omelets there, too. Not a lot of engineering there, though.
The nearby chateau was a royal favourite and is in quite good nick. Not as big as somee others but is quite charming and retains a number of carvings, tapestries and furnishings from the period of 16th and 17th centuries that are incredible pieces.
Tours itself has some amazing architecture and buildings and I'd recommend it as a place to visit. It's also a good base to visit the nearby attractions although once again, way too many of those for a few short days. Best also visited by driving once you get used to the nutters hurtling towards you on the wrong side of the road. Oh, but you can legally do 130km/h and that's not something a Toyota Yaris gets to do often.
On to Gay Paree tomorrow so we'll see how the Internet accessibility fares in that fair city!
Merceey Boocooo
