The rest of the chateaus

I'm going to go fast with these as I am SO far behind now.  The problem is that I've been taking so many pictures and at wifi speeds it takes me forever to upload them to Picasa where I can get them from blogspot.  As of this am, I still had 650+ pictures to upload and they are all 14M pictures (I don't show the full size on blogspot as they'd be unreadable on most screens).

Anyway, we saw a few more chateaus before we left the Gite, but this was a rare double rainbow during one of those rain, sun, hail 10 minute intervals.  The camera didn't do it justice.

The following pictures are of Chamford... a chateau setup for hunting! It was very rarely used.

This is the staircase they believe Leonardo Da Vinci designed... it is a double helix... both sets of landings come down at the same time so people can walk up one set and down another without ever passing each other.

Each set of stairs wraps around this round tower

It is open to the sky these days but has windows so you can see the other people going the other way

Not too fancy as it is "only" a hunting chateau

The obligatory abbey

It took them 70 years to drain the malarial swamps to make these gardens...  malaria in mid-France in the 1400's... could it have been warmer then than now?  I guess they didn't all burn up with global warming.

After Chamford, we drove through the town of Blois and walked around that chateau situated high above the River Cher.

We happened to walk in during the middle of an animatronics shows... those dragons all move!  They popped out of closed windows like the one above the statue and then went away in similar manner leaving a completely normal looking house.

Another little chateau by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere