The Best Women's Travel Writing (6 page)

SUSAN ORLEAN

Storming the Castles

Was it the wine, the wheat, or the wind in her hair?

I
n the Loire Valley you come for the castles but you stay for the wheat. The castles are the headline event, of course—300 spectacular jewel boxes and ornate medieval confections scattered throughout the region, overlooking the meandering river. But the wheat is the richer, subtler surprise, only revealed to the more painstaking traveler. There are miles and miles of it, spread like a gigantic shag carpet—winter wheat, bleached and crisp, and early spring wheat, so fresh it is almost lime-colored, and the summer wheat, golden and bent with the weight of berries.

I first noticed it when we were just a few miles into our bike trip, on a quiet country road where our tires clicked along on the gravel. There were so many wide acres that the wheat looked almost like water rippling in the wind—a tan and gold and green grassy ocean. In a car, which is the way I usually travel, fields are just fields, an undifferentiated blurred space you whip past as you head to the main attractions. But I immediately noticed that on a bicycle, the scale is entirely different. The wheat is almost as high as your head, and it seems to keep you company, whistling and whispering and waving as you ride along.

I had never been to the Loire before, but a year earlier I'd traveled throughout the nearby Meuse Valley. I'd gone there to do some research for my book on the dog actor Rin Tin Tin, who was born there. I love being on the road, but on that trip I noticed for the first time how poorly the pace of driving suits my style. Most of both valleys are farmland, and at sixty miles an hour, that kind of landscape loses its features and you miss out on its secrets. It was only when I stopped my car that I would find something tucked away, tacked on a barn door, its narrative told in a quieter way.

I love France, and that trip to the Meuse Valley planted in me a yearning to experience it at a different pace, one that would allow me to notice it more intimately, see it more closely, but still travel a good distance. Then someone mentioned to me that the Loire Valley is an idyllic place for beginner bike trips. I consulted Google: it turns out there is a 400-plus-mile network of paths and somnolent back roads called the Loire a Velo, a route that has become a magnet for small, quirky, cycling-friendly inns. The distances between these lodgings—as few as fifteen or so miles, though you can do far more—didn't seem hugely intimidating.

Still, it was one thing to fantasize about such a trip and another to actually pull it off. Given the demands of my work schedule, I really wanted to travel with my husband, John, and son, Austin, who's six. But a first grader on a bike trip? In an unfamiliar place where we don't speak the language (or rather, where I think I speak the language but no one seems to share that opinion)? How would that work? Also, could I handle it? I'd been on a bike seat just long enough to know that if I stayed on it much longer, I could get saddle sores.

One thing seemed clear: this would either be the greatest idea ever—or we would be in over our heads from the first turn of the pedals.

For a while, it seemed the trip might dematerialize before we could even start. In the weeks before we left, I became obsessed with chafing. I think, honestly, I was transferring all my cycling-related anxieties into one identifiable problem. The fact was, the farthest I'd ever ridden was a ten-mile loop to the post office. I wasn't in bad shape, but I felt unprepared for a bike trip. In my defense, I live in an area where the topography resembles a huge sheet of bubble wrap; you can barely go a quarter mile in any direction without having to claw your way up an incline or fall off of one. So while ten miles wasn't enough to train me for France, it was a hard ten miles, right? And I would be fine. Right?

What's more, before moving to bumpy upstate New York, I had lived in Manhattan and often rode to work—three miles through Midtown that included life-flashing-before-my-eyes encounters with truck drivers and cabbies intent on viewing cyclists as targets in a roadway shooting gallery. Surely this had toughened me for the Loire Valley, the cradle of kings.

I tried talking myself into a mood of cavalier and confident anticipation, but still, for weeks before we left, I would lie in bed late at night, picturing myself twenty or thirty miles along with my thighs rubbed raw. I could hear the voices of concerned friends muttering an incantation that sounded an awful lot like “chafe, chafe, chafe.” I bought tubs of Bag Balm, on the advice of people on Twitter, from whom I had solicited suggestions. (Yes, I started a hashtag called #chafingadvice. I'm not sure I'm proud of that, but I got dozens of replies.) I ordered Pearl Izumi shorts, and for good measure, a pair of Canari shorts, too—and then, as just one more good measure, I bought a pair of tiny blue Aero Tech Design shorts for Austin, in case he'd inherited my fear of chafing. I kept planning to ride a few extra miles every day to train, but somehow it never happened; I guess I was too busy ordering bike shorts.

There were other issues. My husband and I wanted to ride on our own, not as part of a group, and while there are a number of companies in France that will set up that kind of trip, we kept running into an odd sort of Continental laissez-faire: yes, we can make the trip for you, Madame, but, oh no, not that week. And not quite there. And,
oui
, we will call you back, Madame—or perhaps not, because what you wish for is simply not possible. At home, I had more troubles: Austin decided that he would come only if he could ride his own bike, because, he said, “trail-a-bikes are for babies.” Since he'd just graduated from training wheels, the prospect of double-digit miles with him wobbling along was enough to take my breath away. And here I had thought chafing was the big problem.

But at last the clouds parted. Austin—bribed with the promise he could play on my iPhone during the entire flight to Paris—agreed to use the trail-a-bike, and the maddeningly pleasant but previously disobliging French travel agents suddenly, miraculously, presented us with a complete four-day itinerary.

I packed my oversupply of balms and bike shorts, and we flew to Paris then traveled by train to Blois, where we would start our trip. There we met our travel companions: Gitane Mississippis, sturdy workhorse bikes outfitted with roomy panniers and map holders attached to the handlebars.

We had only a little more than twenty-seven miles to ride, to the town of Amboise, and we were in France, after all, so we started slowly, which in France includes lingering over good food—in this case, perfect French espresso and a basket of croissants oozing almond paste, then stocking up on a dozen madeleines and a bottle of Sancerre for emergency road snacks.

Fed and provisioned, we gathered around our bikes. We were suited up, helmeted, gloved, spandexed; I felt slightly bowlegged from my bike shorts. A woman walked down the sidewalk toward us. She was one of those beautiful, sleek French women who look like they play a lot of tennis but actually just eat a lot of chocolate. She smiled when she saw our pile of gear and our outfits, and suddenly I felt ridiculously over-prepared, like a tenderfoot at a dude ranch.

As she stepped around us, she asked, in English, “Are you bicycling?”

I said we were.

“Well, it's too warm for bicycling,” she said, as if she could read every bit of my apprehension. “It's much better to sit and drink wine.”

I couldn't help wonder, as we set out, if maybe she was right.

The late start meant that we had to push hard the whole time we were riding, and we took only a few breaks, stopping at a bakery on the river near the village of Rilly-sur-Loire for a late lunch of sandwiches of baguettes with sweet and salty ham then for a quick dinner at a cafe not far from Amboise, where the chef had just finished roasting spring lamb with fennel and sweet peas. This was France, after all.

We arrived in Amboise in the dark, and our innkeeper met us at the door looking cross. She reminded us, with a wag of her finger and a reproachful click of her tongue, that she'd expected us earlier. Much earlier. In fact, much, much earlier, which was, evidently, when nicer guests would have arrived. She was impressively fierce for an innkeeper, so we didn't even look around; we just muttered apologies in bad high-school French and scurried to bed, hoping that when we woke up we might be transformed into nicer guests the innkeeper would be happier to see.

In the morning, we tiptoed downstairs and peeked out the front door to at last take in the view. We expected a driveway and maybe an ordinary lawn. Instead, surprise, we found ourselves practically pressing our noses up to the stone flanks of Chateau Royal d'Amboise, a massive castle built in the fifteenth century on a rock spur overlooking the Loire River. In fact, it turned out our inn was built of stone that had tumbled off the chateau over the years. (As with many of the Loire castles, a great deal of attention was paid to head chopping and dungeon banishment and boiling of miscreants in vats of oil, while castle maintenance was somewhat neglected.)

Before getting back on our bikes, we explored the marvelous, echoey pile—a castle part Renaissance, part proto-Tinker Bell's castle, furnished with just a few gargantuan log chairs and wine-toned tapestries. We roamed the stone rooms and trekked up and down the stairs, rubbed smooth by centuries of heavy treading, then we leaned out a Juliet balcony to view the gray-blue ribbon of the Loire, France's longest river and its last major wild one.

Just as we were about to leave, we discovered that the castle harbored one big surprise: the body of Leonardo da Vinci, buried in a chapel just off the entry garden. Leonardo da Vinci? Although I'd never given much thought to his final resting place, I would have pictured it being somewhere other than a chapel outside a chateau in the Loire Valley. But apparently da Vinci was a citizen of the world and spent a lot of time visiting King Francis I, who ruled here during the castle's glory years. Like the best of friends, Francis provided a permanent resting place for da Vinci when he died.

As we left Amboise, I noticed I could read every sign we passed—“
S'il vous plait aidez-nous trouver notre chien perdu Zuzu
” (please help us find our lost dog Zuzu) and “
Maison a vendre”
(house for sale)—a traveler's pleasure if ever there was one. As we coasted along, we could peek through the gates of the occasional oddball museums and attractions, like the Musee Maurice Dufresne, which appeared to be a collection of antique tractors, and my favorite, the Mini Châteaux Val de Loire. (“All of the most famous castles of the Loire Valley in miniature,” the brochure proclaims. “The amazing attention to detail and incredible surroundings will enthrall the whole family!”)

Pedaling onward, we stopped for a real look at the full-size castles, such as Villandry and Chambord and Azay-Le-Rideau and Chatonniere, each one insanely big and so exactly like the castles in cartoons and fairy tales that they looked almost as unreal as the models back at the museum of miniatures. The castles seemed to meet us at every turn, sitting like massive stone birthday cakes on the horizon or looming above as we went grinding up one of the valley's green hills.

There was an ancillary benefit to all of this roadside fascination: I forgot about chafing. Simply forgot. For one thing, being in France means eating and drinking so well, even on the road, that all other concerns seem trivial. But also the bike seats were comfortable, and except for a stiff climb at the beginning and end of each day, the ride was a lazy man's dream. Most of our routes were on flat bike lanes on small roads, or paths that hugged the river, close enough for us to smell the muddy water and see fish popping up now and again and, on our third afternoon, rounding the corner outside Azay-Le-Rideau, to see a family of swans with new-looking chicks out for what might have been one of their very first swims.

There were long stretches of the ride where you could fall into a humming sort of rhythm, almost as if your legs were propelling you forward without any feeling of effort, and the bike was floating; at those moments I thought, I can do this for hours! For days! For weeks! I can bike to Spain and then Russia and then—and then a scabby patch of road would jostle me and bring me back to the moment, and another castle would come into view.

Each night we stayed in a different sort of place—a bed-and-breakfast, a rustic inn that in a previous century had been an apiary, an old converted schoolhouse in a town center. The directions along the way were mostly exemplary but each night, as we closed in on our lodgings, things would go to hell and we'd cast around until we could find our way. Exasperating, but then again, none of these were big commercial hotels; they were wonderful one-off joints with kooky-shaped rooms and, in many cases, a kooky innkeeper who was running the place as a late-in-life hobby.

The balm for this frustration was often a bottle of a gorgeous local wine—a Pouilly-Fumé or a Vouvray or a sparkling Saumur—and a hunk of crottin de chavignol, the Loire Valley's famous goat cheese, shaped like a wheel and tasting of nuts. Our wrong turns really didn't seem so bad after that.