One of the best things we did in France was to walk part of the Grand Randonnée Troisième, or GR3 for short. France has an extensive network of through routes (the GRs) and local loops (the GRPs - Grand Randonnée de Pays), all designed for the walker who needs to eat and sleep in relative civilization.
Using our guide Walks in the Loire Valley, we chose several candidate hikes in the 11-14 km range. We wanted to walk along the Loire, and perhaps visit a castle and/or a vine
yard. The catch was that we had to park the car somewhere, find a taxi to take us to our starting point and then walk back to the car. We opted for an 11 km route from Muides-sur-Loire (starting on the bridge - see picture) to the Château de Chambord, including several kilometres along the left bank of the Loire, and an equal distance in the forest of Chambord where we hoped to see sanglier (wild boar) and deer. Of course, in the event we saw neither.
Although we didn't get to see a proper vignoble, we did pass by a field (if that's the correct term) of vines with nice juicy looking red grapes.
Before our next GR outing, we will be sure to get an up-to-date guide to the trail -- ours was 19 years old and the trail has been moved around some private property (the bourgeousie doesn't like people walking on their hard-earned land).
We had planned to get a nice lunch somewhere (the guide helpfully shows villages with restaurants). The village we aimed for, St. Dyé, had two restaurants. One was closed, however. The other was Le Manoir de Bel Air, a 1.5 km detour and one of those really fancy French places where lunch takes three hours or so. After sitting down with a cool Kronenbourg 1664 and finding that the least expensive menu cost considerably more than any of the dinner menus we'd seen and was likely to take several hours, we decided to go to the boulangerie and get quiche instead. But our waitress, unfazed by our hiking clothes and backpack, suggested very pleasantly that we should have dessert! Did we hear that right? A French waiter making a helpful suggestion? We did order the desserts and they were absolutely formidables! The Manoir really went up in our estimation.
By the time we got to Chambord - the view shown at the top - the crowds had thinned considerably and we had a great visit. Our first stop was the (reputedly) DaVinci-designed double-helix main staircase (the only other that I know personally is at the Oxford University Engineering Lab). One of the remarkable, if not shocking, facts we learned was that the two Kings most associated with this overgrown hunting lodge, François I and Louis XIV, counted the number of days they actually lived at Chambord in the tens! No wonder there was a revolution!
All in all, a really fantastic day. We will definitely want to do something like that again.
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