In my experience, there are two Frances; Paris and all of the rest. The Europe-in-10-days crowds realistically don’t have enough time to experience this first hand one way or the other. Sometimes it’s preferable to be the tortoise and not the hare though, as in France this could get you out into the country. And there’s a lot of France outside Paris. When in the Loire Valley, which is precisely where Tours is situated, a reasonably common thing to do is to ride along the dedicated and mostly well-market “La Loire A Velo” bike path. Determined riders start in one end and keep going until they’ve ridden all of it, some 800km. More casual people like ourselves, however, rent a couple of reliable bikes, e.g. from Detours in Tours, and do day trips.

Having been sidelined by poorly timed colds that upended our otherwise fairly ambitious schedule, we figured that we’d only be able to wheeze, honk and cough through two day trips, each no farther out of Tours than 2-2.5 hours. On the first day, we decided to go west to Villandry. While the majority of the bike route to Villandry is along a tributary to the Loire river called Cher, one has to earn the tranquil roll along the lazily flowing river by first riding through the anything-but-tranquil Tours. Now, to be fair, the official bike path, does cut through Tours, but in many places it’s still on a shared roadway so relaxing it is not. To add insult to injury, I pulled one of my standard stunts by getting slightly turned around that made us miss the path and into some serious traffic where we were, let’s say unwelcome. After the initial trial by fire, the path was pleasant, generally in good repair and frequented by a number of fellow riders, many of whom greeted us with smiling Bonjours in tourist-French that was even worse than ours. Did we really look like locals with our rented bikes and travel garb?

After a couple of hours we reached Villandry and fortified in one of the, count ’em, three restaurants, all of which seemed affiliated with a small hotel. We were truly out in the country at this point. Villandry has a claim to fame, though. Its chateau sports one of the most impressive garden grounds that I’ve seen, bar none. Having some idea of what to expect from promotional material, we didn’t mind paying the 7 Euro each to get garden-only entry. The grounds are immaculately maintained, partitioned off into distinct sections yet seamlessly integrated. The recommended counter-clockwise spin around the grounds took us through a rugged forest trail, through razor-sharp lawns, water features, sun-garden, a maze, herb garden, countless arbours with an array of different kinds of grapes plus, last but not least, a food garden that is productive, aesthetic and an engineering feat all at the same time. Placards outlined in some detail how the thoughtfully each garden is planned for each year to not deplete the soil and to maximize symbiotic benefits by making certain plants neighbours of each other but not others. In addition, it’s easy to see that there’s no small measure of pride in terms of how they have managed to keep the grounds watered while only using a minimum of municipal resources and importantly wasting nothing.

I’m normally not someone who makes a point of visiting castles or chateaus, but the grounds of Chateau de Villandry are an incredible display of fauna fanaticism (in the best possible sense) that should not be missed.