Storming the Castles
Was it the wine, the wheat, or the wind in her hair?
In 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.
But on our third day, we rode for hours through my now-beloved wheat fields and down among some vineyards, and as the afternoon slipped into dusk we made our way through the city of Tours. We were staying in a town southwest of Tours called Ballan-Mire, at an inn called Chateau des Templiers. Easy. This particular day my husband, a more experienced rider, had gone on ahead.
The section through Tours included a patch of bad traffic and a mile or so through a grimy commercial district—the only sliver of the trip that wasn’t pastoral. No matter: surely we were close to Ballan-Mire. The route circled a city park and a university campus undergoing all kinds of construction. We lost the trail there, somewhere between a backhoe loader and a tower crane. Where there should have been a golf course, we found a torn-up soccer stadium and half-built faculty housing. Austin and I rode on and reached a stream that was not supposed to be there. We backtracked. A pair of young men were jogging past, so I flagged them down. Golf course? Ballan-Mire? Smiles all around, shrugs, a few gestures to what they thought might be the right direction.
We headed the way they had indicated, but the path petered out, ending back at the edge of the stream that wasn’t supposed to be there. Very few people passed, and the few who did smiled pleasantly, shrugged, pointed this way and that, then headed off. My patience was fraying. I glanced at my son, who was starting to list to the right on his trail-a-bike; I held my breath, hoping nothing would set off the question every parent dreads.
He looked over. “Mommy,” he said, “when are we going to get there?”
Busted. “A few minutes,” I said. “Let’s go this way.”
We doubled back again, tried another sidewalk, then another. Now the place was deserted. The sun tucked in behind some clouds and dimmed. We crossed one road, then another, each stretch mysteriously emptier and less marked and more confounding. I felt ridiculous. Lost here, of all places, in the exurban sprawl of a large French city? Wilderness, maybe, but here? So humiliating!
“Mommy, when will we get there?” Austin trilled. “It’s more than a few minutes.”
“I’ll call Daddy,” I said. Of course, my phone didn’t work. Why had I spent so much time buying Bag Balm instead of setting up an international calling plan?
“Mommy?”
“Oh, look!” I said, “a nice man!” We had just turned a corner, and there, in this peculiarly depopulated town, was a middle-aged man running a clipper over his hedges.
“Hello, nice man!” I yelled, probably sounding a little insane and keyed up, the way you can be when you are calculating to the microsecond exactly how much time you have before your child starts an endless loop of “When are we going to get there?” in high volume. The man didn’t notice us at first—that is, until I leaped off my bicycle and went running into his yard, shouting, “We’re lost! We’re lost! We’re lost!”
Within moments, his wife emerged from the house with a kindly attitude and chocolate cookies and orange juice and a cell phone, with which they called the unattainable Shangri-la of Ballan-Mire. I asked if they could call us a taxi and let us leave our bikes in their yard until the morning, but the couple seemed tickled by their windfall of visitors and the chance to help out. They decided they wanted to drive us there, so they loaded us into their car and delivered us, then made another round-trip to bring our bikes once we were installed and debriefed. It turns out that we had been nowhere, nowhere at all, near Ballan-Mire. Even after examining the map in detail, I couldn’t figure out how we’d gone wrong, or, for that matter, where we had actually been. It was as if we’d fallen into a wormhole for a while.
It was far too late to go out to eat, so our innkeeper insisted on making dinner for us; we sat around her big oak kitchen table, eating good pasta and drinking her wine, and trying to piece together how the bike path had vaporized. Out of it came a reminder of how the misfirings in travel are often what stick with you, much more than those things you think you’re supposed to care about and find inspiring.
We had one more castle to go, the marvelous Forteresse Royale, a huge blocky structure on a steep hillside above Chinon. We took a few wrong turns on the way—a combination of fatigue and inattention to our itinerary, and the recklessness you feel toward the end of a journey—so we rode into Chinon not along the river, pedaling steadily and slowly along the recommended route, but slaloming down a raggedy road that pitched nearly headlong to the river. It was crazy and exhilarating, the perfect punctuation to a day that had been gently mesmerizing.
By this time, I felt like Superman, like I could ride anywhere. I was happiest on the days we rode the farthest, the days we were on the road for five or six hours, zooming along as if I had done this my whole life. I was suddenly seized with the desire to do nothing but bike trips—the intimacy of the view, the chance to see and smell and listen as part of the travel, thrilled me. And the whole notion of chafing seemed ridiculous. Could I have really been begging people via social media to help save me from this? Maybe I would start a new hashtag: #pleasesendmeanywhereonabike.
The plunge into town, into the lap of the castle, was a great payoff. For me, the day had already been full, because I felt practically melded to my bike now, almost flying through those perfect tan and golden wheat fields that had sung to us on our way to Chinon. I now knew that on a bike I could see places the way I love to, close enough to notice the odds and ends that gave it texture, at a pace that made me feel like I was truly in it—part of it—and not just passing through.
Susan Orlean is the bestselling author of eight books, including My Kind of Place; The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Oscar-wining movie Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, a sweeping account of Rin Tin Tin’s journey from orphaned puppy to movie star and international icon published in 2011, was a New York Times bestseller and a Notable book of 2011. Orlean has written for Vogue, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Smithsonian, and has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992. She has covered a wide range of subjects—from umbrella inventors to origami artists to skater Tonya Harding—and she has often written about animals, including show dogs, racing pigeons, animal actors, oxen, donkeys, mules, and backyard chickens. She lives in upstate New York and Los Angeles with one dog, three cats, eight chickens, four turkeys, four guinea fowl, twelve Black Angus cattle, three ducks, and her husband and son.