Loire Valley

I guess there's not much more to say about the mice situation since I’ve caught ZERO mice so I’ll go into the Loire Valley =) Its a much happier story =) Pretty much, it was a last minute trip. My friend Oliver and I decided on Wednesday afternoon and left Thursday morning (October 25 -27). The original plan was to visit both the Loire Valley and then check out the Bordeaux region after but the Val de Loire was so beautiful that we ended up getting stuck there the entire weekend =)

So that morning, we met at the Gare to pick up the car from Europcar. Little did we know, that we'd be given a tank. This car was sooo huge that we could barely make it out of the parking lot. The antenna would always hit the ceiling bars when we drove by them. Needless to say, we changed the car. But when we finally got going, our first destination was Chateau Chambord =) Beautiful! Much better than Neuschwanstein in Bavaria since this chateau was actually used and on top of that, almost all the rooms were available to the public to see. The one in Bavaria was never finished and so I felt jipped when the tour ended after twenty minutes. The best part of the Chateau was the roof. They just went buckwild up there with chimneys and towers and whatnot.
In this picture you can see the view from the rooftop of Chateau Chambord. There's a beautiful lake (manmade I'm sure) that you can paddleboat in. I wanted to go but we ran out of time =)

We stayed in Tours the first night and it was a much larger city than the other cities that we had been passing by, such as Ambroise and Blois. This is a picture of the small towns around Tours and the Loire river.

But Tours had this one cute area called Place de Plumereau that had all the old-style buildings with the criss-crossed timber so it still had a "small-town" feel in that area. We ended up at a small jazz bar and were about 5 feet from the band! They were native to Tours and just do local gigs but I thought the lead singer was really good and she probably could have toured in the States and made tons of money.

The next day, we tried to go wine tasting but quickly realized that the local vignons were all on harvest so our only option was to go to this place called the Productuers de la caves in Vouvray where they had the wines from all local wineries and you could go wine tasting there =)

• Positive: Wine-tasting in France is free =) And the bottles are ridiculously cheap.
• Negative: They recommend that you only take 5-8 tastes MAX (and they're pretty insistent about that because of how you lose your taste with each new wine). This is compared to the 20+ tastes we get when we go wine tasting back in Cali (aaaahh…memories of Temecula) =)

I think we bought 5 bottles each =) It was a good day =) After, we decided to visit another chateau called Chateau Chenonceau. I didn't think that anything could beat Chateau Chambord but this did =) It's this giant castle thing that's built over a river and it's surrounded by these moats with drawbridges =) Then around the castle, besides the beautiful river and forest, they have two giant manicured gardens with fountains in the middle.

And just to top it off...there's a human labyrinth =) I didn't go in but I really really wanted to =) Even the "barn" area where the bathrooms were gorgeous.

So that night, we finished the day with a huge gastronomic experience. Not to make you guys all hungry but we started off by a complimentary course from the chef. It was a mix of egg and mayo and some kind of herb and it was deelicious =) Next, appetizers. For the main course, I had this =)

It's salmon wrapped in some kind of crispy thing over a pesto/cheese thingie with potatoes and a yummy mushroom cream sauce. Oliver had a regional plate that's specific to the Loire Valley area. We determined that it's a type of bird but I still don't know what it is.

Theeeen, it was the Cheese Plate. This waitress comes up with this rolling cart FULL of cheeses and slices a bit of each one and puts it on a plate. They had a mix of both the cow and goat cheese and I never knew that I liked goat cheese until I had some of the cheese on that plate =) It's not as strong as I always thought it was. In fact, the goat cheese on the plate were milder than one of the cow ones. By the time my dessert came (crème brulee), we were stuffed and I didn't have any room in my stomach. All the extra space was taken by the bottle of wine that we got too. I'm pretty sure Oliver unbuttoned when I wasn't looking. I was so full that I walked out of the restaurant rubbing my tummy and a random stranger walked by and commented that I must have had a great meal. Indeed. =)

The last day of our Loire Valley trip, we drove to this area called Monmousseau where they have their cellars (caves en Francais) built into the rock. Turns out, when they were building the chateaus in the medieval times, they dug the rock out of the area and left giant mined areas. They realized how these holes in the rock were the perfect temperature and humidity for storing wine and now they use it to produce their wines. What are the odds? At any given time, the Monmousseau caves hold about 4 million bottles.

So that was the end of the trip. Unfortunately, we had to go back after that and little did I know at the time, that it was the eve of the war with the 3 Blind Mice.