Les Châteaux de Chenonceau et Clos Lucé

So this Saturday, we visited the Chateau de Chenanceau, which was most famously the home of King Henry III and Queen Catherine di Medici (we're talking French Henrys, not the Tudors, just to clarify). Have you seen Ever After? Portions of the film were filmed with this chateau in mind, as well as Chambourd (see last week's post). What I loved about this chateau was the way it sits on the water.
Above, you can see the Chateau from the front. What you don't really see yet is the way it extends over the water in the back, like this:

The kitchens are located down in the wells of the arches, so that when you visit different areas of them, you have to walk up some stairs, cross over the arch and walk back down. It's very cool. More on that later.

This is the inside of the part of the chateau that extends over the water. It's a really long hallway with beautifully tiled floor for the time period. I loved that the tile wasn't exactly even; every single tile in that floor is hand-cut and has it's own story. I just really loved that idea.

So this is super cool. This is located down in one of the wells of the arches over the river, and in the olden days they used it to pump water from the river into the kitchen. How cool is that? You turn the wheel and voila! Running water in the 16th century!

Here is a better view of the chateau as a whole. The best views for pictures were from the water, so I didn't get a really great picture of the whole thing.

The Chateau also has some really great gardens. Not as big as you might imagine, but still really beautiful with lots of colors and a few fountains.

This is the Chateau du Clos Lucé, the house of Leonardo di Vinci. It's not quite as big as the other chateaux we've visited, but still super impressive.

This is Leonardo di Vinci's bed. And yes, that is a cat! Had the fright of my life when it stood up and turned around while we were all watching, then went right back to sleep. That cat has the life, getting to sleep on Leonardo's bed all day!

In the house, there were a lot of reincarnations of Leonardo's inventions, reassembled with the materials of the day. These are the precursors to the bicycle and a motorized cart.

This is an early windmill with a different design, obviously. Pretty cool though.

This last thing is a water-transporting pump. You attach several of these in a certain configuration, and you can move gallons of water from one place to another by turning the handle. Leonardo was sooo ahead of his time!

Leonardo's house was pretty awesome. The best part was all the inventions scattered around the grounds that you could just try out if you wanted. The house was cool, yes, but all of those inventions and computer-animated demonstrations right next to the invention were really interesting. So the long and short of it is that Saturday was awesome. Tomorrow I'll put up some stuff about my visit to the Musée des Beaux Arts!