Villandry, FR to Saumur, FR

37.2 mi / 11.6 mph / 185 ft. climbing
Home: Peggy’s AirBNB

Our final Loire Valley castle visit, Château de Villandry, was right across the quiet road from our glamping site. Unfortunately, the gate there was the back service entrance, with the public entrance all the way down the hill and on the opposite side of town. So that meant packing up and taking our bikes down with us for our morning visit. Still, we got there, 6th in line, before the gates opened at 9am.

Villandry filled in the final square on Rett’s French Castle Bingo card: “Gardens”. And in fact, the gardens are so much the focus at Villandry that we skipped the ticket that would have allowed us to tour the castle as well (though the route to the elevated gardens does briefly use an interior stairwell of the castle). Rett did a great job of making each of our Loire castle visits worthwhile and distinctive, so despite being our fourth “castle” tour, the gardens at Villandry still felt like something completely new and exciting.

We barely saw the inside of the building at Villandry, but there was more than enough to see outside!

From the roof level of the castle, a line of cyclists rides down the EuroVelo trail.

This geometric section of the gardens is best seen from above, and thankfully a high platform runs along the hillside to the east that brings you a view even higher than you would get from the windows of the top floor of the main house.

Our early arrival meant few people were in the gardens initially, but we later learned that no one is allowed in the geometric section in the foreground, maybe just to make photos better?

Trails lead even higher up the hillside and into the woods above the gardens.

The church and village sit outside the castle walls, past the vegetable gardens. The white tents are farmers-market-style vendors selling their wares (though the actual vegetable sales were in another area).

Now at the “back” of the property, last night’s glamping tent was just a little ways into the trees. I sometimes think that pet-obsession is a relatively-modern development, but prominent featuring of dogs in the Renaissance paintings in these castles, along with this statue, tells me the instinct has been there forever, we just needed to wait until every commoner was as wealthy as a 16th-century nobleman.

A swan generously poses for me in the gardens’ reflecting pool.

Rett gets lost in her 2nd labyrinth in two days.

The labyrinth walls seem to have been here for a long time.

A gallery that looks down onto the vegetable gardens.

A very romantic castle, this Villandry.

The vegetable gardens are as carefully-designed as the geometric gardens for visual impact and symmetry, they just happen to use edible and productive plants for their contrasting colors and textures.

The cloudy morning meant that the colors of the garden were glowing with their own light.

A veritable forest of kale. The quality and bounty of the produce here would probably cause most backyard gardeners to give up in despair (especially since 50% of the gardeners’ effort is being “wasted” on visual design!), but I guess that’s what you can achieve with a full-time army of gardeners funded by ticket sales?

Clearly the bright green kale is insufficient, we need some of this contrasting purple kale to call ourselves true gardeners!

Reverse angle of the swan shot from earlier, but the swan got tired of waiting for me to make my way around the gardens.

Carp in the castle’s moat being creepy.

Rett might have screwed up though, because we stopped to eat our packed lunches at a minor crossroads that looked down to yet another towering castle half a mile away. A quick check of Google Maps for the name revealed that Château d’Ussé was perhaps an inspiration for Sleeping Beauty (the source of Rett’s Favorite Disney Princess™), and leverages that for its gimmick: scenes from the fairy tale set up in various rooms. I said we could go, we’d still get to our destination before dark, but I guess she’s all castled-out.

Lunch at the crossroads above Château d’Ussé.

As we sat right at the edge of the road eating, nearly every cyclist that passed by (of maybe 20) said “bonjour”. This wasn’t a surprise; when we’re in motion, nearly every passing cyclist in France gives us a wave, even many of the roadies, making it the least-discriminatory cycling culture we’ve encountered (especially since zero pedestrians “bonjour!” each other in France).

What is surprising is how many other cyclists notice that we’re different, and smile approvingly, or point us out to their partners. We’re in a country where half the urban commuters have two Ortlieb panniers hanging from their rear racks, to say nothing of the dozens (hundreds?) of people actually doing week-long bike tours of the Loire Valley. I feel like the eyes of American cyclists would be incapable of seeing anything finer-grained than “people who lug crap on their bikes”, just like I can’t differentiate one squirrel from another. But in France, we’re clearly clocked as real bike tourers, on an adventure of a scale that many of our observers are clearly knowledgeable enough about to perhaps even dream of doing themselves someday.

A few of those cyclists ride down to Château d’Ussé, home of Sleeping Beauty.

When we crossed the Vienne where it converges with the Loire, we began another stretch where cream-colored limestone cliffs rise up along the south bank, and people have dug holes in those cliffs. Those people are literally known as “troglodytes”, though the term seems to be used here in France in a non-derogatory sense. Here, the cliff-dwellings stretched almost-continuously for 8 miles all the way into Saurmur. So we saw an endless variety of human constructions grafted onto natural stone, something that would be fascinating to explore.

But no one was exploring! I’m baffled that it’s not a major tourist destination, with walking paths linking cave-house AirBNBs to wineries to cute heirloom-mushroom shops to restaurants. In many places, you could stroll a mile or two along the (quiet) road and river, and then loop back on an “upper” path set back and higher up on the cliffs, and if you reach the top, stroll amongst the endless vineyards that hide up there. But it seems that no one has figured out how to monetize this valuable natural and cultural resource. There essentially are no restaurants, shops, or AirBNBs. Perhaps it’s just the same cause afflicting all French rural villages: not enough people (especially young people) live in them anymore to keep them economically alive.

Crossing the Vienne River and looking across to the village of Candes Saint-Martin.

Inside Candes Saint-Martin, another French village where the houses generally seem to be lived in, but there is little external sign of life.

Oh, hey, and some of those non-existent tourists could visit this castle on their walks, especially since, unlike most, it sits imposingly right on the public road!

One example (of hundreds) of dwellings backed into the cliffs and climbing up in tiers. This is a unique fantasyland, people!

Oh hey, and here’s another min-castle, also integrated directly into the cliff behind it.

La Grande Vignolle is at least one place that seems to be making a go of attracting visitors.

Ok, tourist attractions aren’t completely absent!

When we reached Saurmur, with its castle and churches and Sunday market rising above the river bank, Rett was disappointed that we weren’t staying there in town, and instead had booked an AirBNB on the opposite side of the river out in the boonies. We certainly could have stayed in town, if we’d known how attractive it was, but that would have required researching our route ahead, and that’s something Rett gets reluctant to do when the reality hits that we can’t stop at every cool place she finds. But without putting any work in, we won’t stop at any cool place.

The hurt was soothed a little when our boonies AirBNB turned out to be a gorgeous garden site of its own, and got even better when the softly-clanging bells we heard turned out to be around the necks of a cute mini-herd of mini-goats on the back of the property. Because we’ve seen plenty of castles and churches, but not nearly enough goats!