Free The Best Women's Travel Writing by Lavinia Spalding Page A

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