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| Chateau d'Amboise |
Today I'm leaving for spring break. I'm more or less travelling by myself for 18 days - except in Madrid where I'll be staying with a friend and Granada, where I have several friends. My trip is going to take me into the south of France and eventually into Spain. Should be fantastic. In 48 hours I'll be in the French city of Tours, a medieval town in the famous Loire Valley.
Written on Friday April 17th:
It's Friday night, the last night of my time in Tours. With its ups and downs, I have successfully completed my first solo travel trip. It is incredibly weird to travel by yourself. Especially if you're not staying in a hostel, but an Airbnb like I was. For starters, today I did not have a single conversation out loud in English. I think this was the first time that such a thing has happened since I arrived in France. The second thing is that what you do, what you see, and how you travel in general are completely up to you. I woke up pretty late Thursday and today because frankly there was no reason not to. So in that sense, you don't have to conform to anyone else's schedules.
The downside of making your own schedule is the lack of motivation that can occur when travelling. If I'm feeling "out of it", there are no parents or travel buddies to motivate me to get off my ass. The city of Tours was a nice place to practice my solo travel skills. I've learned that, while I don't need to make a specific schedule of what I want to do each day, it helps to have some sites in mind that I want to visit - and ways to find them. Otherwise the mornings drag on and motivation becomes scarce.
Tours itself is an awesome place. It's located a little over an hour southwest of Paris, in the Loire Valley region of France. There are tons of castles here. I'm pretty done for the day today and I don't really plan on adding pictures to this blog. But they're all on my Facebook page and I can post a couple on this post later in the week. On Wednesday I got into the city in the early evening, so I basically walked around for a while and grabbed some dinner.
My Airbnb host, Loris, is a super chill guy who does marketing for a French basketball team. His apartment is about two blocks from the Cathedral of Tours, which is an important site in the city.
Thursday I woke up quite late. Once I had moved my ass out of bed, I sauntered over to the Tourism Office and bought myself a tour of the Amboise, Clos de Luce, and Chenonceau castles, as well as a short wine tasting. Amboise was, for a time, the castle of the French King Francois I. It was my first French castle that I've seen, and it was awesome. After Amboise we drove just two minutes away to Clos de Luce, which is where Leonardo da Vinci lived in the last three years of his life. It was small, but it featured a lot of Leonardo's invention ideas made into full-scale models. So that was sweet.
The last castle, Chenonceau, was awesome. It is a real, full-sized castle with a huge garden and forest area. Chenonceau was actually built on a river, so when you're in the castle you can look out onto the river. After Chenonceau we checked out a wine cavern, where they make sparkling wine which is similar but not at all identical to Champagne. Every day for like months they have to turn each bottle a quarter turn so that the sediments inside of it collect and can be extracted later.
Friday, today, I didn't do a ton. It was raining a lot and quite overcast out. I did do two things which are big in Tours. The first was visiting the Musee des Beaux-Arts, an art museum right by the Tours Cathedral. The second was visiting the Castle of Torus. You can't climb that castle but they had a dope photography exposition that I spent some time checking out. It was of everyday life in oppressive regimes during World War II.
Now I'm chilling on the coach around 10pm at the Airbnb with my host and a couple of his buddies. We're watching Greece beat up Barcelona at basketball. I leave around 8:30am for Bordeaux tomorrow, where I'll hopefully get to check out some good wines. Should be fun! More updates to follow.
