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| | | | It's cheating, but I like it
From the Daily Mail
There's something about sleeping under canvas and scrubbing your armpits in public that's supposed to make you feel at one with nature. Living in a caravan doesn't really put you in touch with the earth, they say. I'm not arguing. I've touched the earth on one too many a rain-drenched British summer. That's precisely why, as I approach the brow of middle age, caravans are starting to look ever more appealing.
As I write, I have my feet up in a state-of-the-art Grand 3B mobile home. The 3B stands for three (yes, three) bedrooms and two bathrooms. Hardly mobile at all, our luxury residence nestles ostentatiously in the wooded grounds of a Loire Valley manor house.
Before lounging on the long sofa, I dried my hair with the fitted hairdryer, made myself a cafetiere coffee - cafetiere supplied - and warmed my croissant in the microwave (a hot holiday tip for Francophiles - pain au chocolat zapped on full for just under a minute is meltingly moreish). What else? Oh yes, I'm listening to Bach on the integral stereo CD.
We made dinner on the gas barbecue. There's a gas fire in case we're cold and an electric fan should we get too hot. There are British plugs, fitted carpets, pine furniture and tasteful pictures on the wall. This home-from-home is rather better than my house. Caravanning may be cheating, but I like it.
Swish mobile homes are just the thing in the Loire Valley, where the tourist theme is Renaissance architecture - and you don't want to feel outdone by the 16th century. You can't move for castles. There are small chateaux masquerading as gites, bigger ones that double as hotels and real 'larger than you thought possible' fairytale palaces that make you wonder how so few people ever dared to was never one of my favourite post-dinner pursuits.
But in a caravan your workload is halved. No more stumbling to the lavatory in the middle of the night, no more loo rolls flapping under your arm, and certainly no more excursions with the washing-up bowl.
Travel guide: Loire Valley
A fine wine list crowns valley of the kings
From the Mail on Sunday
The caves are dank and dark. They smell of old wines and new sweat. Into them, cyclists, garbed like spacemen, suddenly whizz or wobble. Four thousand of them - more Dad's Army than Tour de France with Darby and Joan on tandems, too - are out on the Loire Valley's autumnal ride.
'Sixty kilometres this morning,' gasps one old codger, white hair ballooning out of his ludicrously dazzling blue space helmet. 'This our second stop. The first was, of course, for mushrooms in the caves of the troglodytes.' This bizarre scene feels somewhat further away than the five-hour smooth Eurostar and TGV run from Waterloo.
Wine is the top product of the lovely Loire; cave-grown mushrooms are the next. The caves where I had stopped were in Saumur, beneath the most beautiful of all the area's 500 chateaux. These are 'caves' the labyrinthine chalk-hewn cellars of Bouvet Laduby, producers of fizzy wines, white, rose and red. They are entertaining the cyclist hordes who totter off, bearing dozens of wines they've bought at the subsequent tastings.
I love the Loire. It's so handy and there is so much to see. And I know its wines from Nantes up to Sancerre, from Gros Plant and Muscadet-sur-Lie (always better than plain Muscadet) past the gentle reds of Chinon and Saumur, on past delicious Pouilly and the mixed blessings of Sancerre.
For too long I had dismissed Tours as too large a block across the Loire en route to vineyards, villages and forests. But this time it yielded up pretty secrets. Plus a top-class restaurant. Of its 280,000 citizens, one in 10 is a student. These bring a buzz. The locals speak, they claim, the purest French in the world. So foreign youth flocks in to study and to lark about.
Opposite a stark new university block spreads a warren of medieval streets around the charming Place Plumereau; cobbled lanes, half-timbered, lurching houses of tiny red bricks with outside stairwells encased in rosy, tottering towers.
Round the 16th-century square are classy shops behind Dickensian windows, an 18th Century building with a galleried Italianate top floor and a pub called Au Bureau so persons therein downing the Touraine wines can truthfully tell their partners that they are 'still at the office'.
Nearby stand the ruins of the colossal cathedral. Its two towers are beautifully lit by the man who does the Eiffel Tower. Here are the stumps of the old Roman city. The remaining cathedral is a fine building, with 300 years in construction from the 13th to the 16th Centuries. It illustrates all three styles; Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance. Its two western towers are not exact twins. Its eastern windows are glorious.
Hither in the Fourth Century rode Saint Martin, then a Roman Legionary, who, giving half his cloak to a freezing beggar, learned in a dream that night that the beggar was Christ. Martin busily Christianised the area, 700 years before the Normans started to civilise England.
For the inner man there lurks in the city the double-Michelin-Rosetted Jean Bardet, a grand merchant's mansion lavishly done up and commanded by a stern Madame with her two scuttling spaniels. A fabulous five-course dinner was here consumed over four leisurely hours for some £40 a head. Good meals need pauses. Bardet is mad about old-fashioned vegetables, has a splendid kitchen garden and his vegetarian menu looked delicious.
Travel guide: Loire Valley
Embracing the Love Coast
From the Daily Mail
Last summer, while I was making my way through France towards the Loire, I turned off at Nantes and found myself in a part of the country I had never seen before.
It lies between the wooded Vilaine River and the shipyards of St Nazaire, and its true name is the Guerande Peninsula. But at the beginning of this century a local newspaper invited readers to dream up a more romantic title to attract visitors. The name they chose was a real winner. They called it the Cote d'Amour - the Coast of Love.
Since then, thousands of holiday-makers have fallen for its charms. Every summer, the creme de la creme of French society descends on La Baule, the region's glitziest resort, to play the casinos or gallop horses over six miles of the finest sands in Europe. But the rest of the coast is much less known, especially to Britons. Surprising, really, when it's so easy to get there.
I travelled overnight with Brittany Ferries from Portsmouth to St Malo. We docked next morning and three hours later, thanks to the toll-free motorways, I was tucking into my first seafood lunch overlooking the harbour at La Turballe. I chose sardines for my main course. La Turballe is the biggest sardine fishing port in France so the 'blue gold', as the locals call them, come straight from the boats to your table.
Seafood is one of the main reasons for coming to the Love Coast. Oysters appear on every menu, followed by sea bass, crab and lobster prepared a dozen different ways. But the sea itself is what most visitors come to enjoy.
From La Baule I followed the coast road through Le Pouligen - whose Breton name means 'Little White Cove'. The shores here are low but rugged, with elegant, turn-of-the-century villas tucked among the pines and long fingers of granite alternating with sandy coves and sheltered harbours.
Free parking is another bonus in this decidedly laid-back corner of France. If only driving in Britain could be like this. In Le Croisic I simply found a space by the harbour and wandered off into the maze of back streets to admire the beautifully restored Breton-style houses and cottages with their sky-blue shutters and granite doorways.
Behind Le Croisic lies a mysterious world: part land, part water, a gleaming mosaic of grassy embankments and brine-filled lagoons. These are the marais salants, or salt marshes, where men have been harvesting sea salt for a thousand years. Drive out along the winding causewayed roads and you will see the paludiers using old-fashioned wooden rakes to scoop up the salt into glistening pyramids of fine white crystals.
Travel guide: Loire Valley
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| | | | Chateaux galore
The Loire chateaux were originally built as the holiday homes of French kings and queens. Adorned with turrets and towers and fancy staircases, and sitting in grounds the size of Windsor Great Park, they attract thousands of culturally minded visitors every year. We met many Britons and Dutch, some Italians and Japanese - but mainly the French themselves, who go there to marvel at their own colourful and vainglorious history.
Even our campsite had a chateau in it - just a little one, called Le Chateau des Marais (the Manor House of the Marshlands). It's not marshy these days, just flat, which makes it ideal cycling territory. So we hired bikes from reception and set off on a day of discovery. Bicycles are still the best way to see France. We pottered by the banks of the fast-flowing Loire river and tootled through a village with an ancient church, a deserted museum and a small bar.
This is the kind of village they put in brochures. What they don't tell you about are the juggernauts that thunder past the peeling and shuttered medieval houses. The air was hot and humming with flies. We pushed on, down long avenues of trees, past enormous fields of sunflowers with sorry heads - 'We've had enough of all that sunshine, we overdid it,' they seemed to say.
Cars gave us a wide berth. Joe, aged five, sat in the child seat behind his dad and shouted instructions. He's small with a very loud voice and would make an excellent rowing cox.
Then, finally, at the end of one of the longest avenues, we spied our first real chateau. Chateau Chambord is the biggest of all - a Grand 3B of a chateau, with its vast round towers, double-spiral staircase and interconnecting royal apartments. They say it has a fireplace for every day of the year, but what they mean is, there are too many to count. Look at Chambord and you see why the Loire region comes top of every French survey on the quality of life.
When Francois I built Chambord, he used to say 'Allons chez moi' ('Let's go to my place'), an invitation to his friends for a hunting weekend at the royal pied-a-terre. Unfortunately, he managed to say this only a few times in his life because he was so busy. So Chambord was rarely inhabited during its 500-year history, which was good news for the deer and wild boar that still roam its 14,000-acre park.
When Francois I created his weekend retreat with more than 450 rooms and 70 staircases, he was essentially building a visitors' attraction for the future; the first French theme park. The theme, of course, is history. With no concessions to modern marketing and without even furnishing many of its opulent rooms, Chambord is a honey-pot for discerning tourists.
Sound and light shows - son et lumiere - were pioneered at Chambord in 1952. They are now a compelling feature of any self-respecting French chateau. At Chenonceau, one of the prettiest, you'll see a traditional version with external light effects, music and the booming voice of a hidden narrator. At Blois and Amboise, a more theatrical display usually involves local actors depicting historical scenes.
But at Chambord, they've gone all experimental. At 10.30pm, I arrived with my two daughters for a chilling spectacle inside the darkened castle. Each party was given a lantern, and we made our way gingerly across the lawn and over the moat to the vast front door.
A screen of skeletal trees black and blue - was projected on to the facade of the building. Inside, crowds swarmed at random. Each room held different images and sounds: a lone violin player, shadows of dancers behind a translucent screen, projections of old paintings onto shards of broken mirror glass.
Unsettled and exhilarated, we return to our caravan. As I put the girls to bed, it occurred to me how safe I felt in my temporary home-from-home and how much easier it was to take a holiday now than in the days of Francois I. Still, I might try issuing an invitation to my friends next year: 'Allons,' I could say, 'chez moi.'
A rich history
Once from a farm on Tours' fringe I rode with my daughters across country to delectable but sad little Azay-le-Rideau, the 'Island Castle'. Built for a banker and for the hot sun in the early 1500s, its open stairways are chilly marvels. Over my many visits I've noted happily that the State has slowly added more furniture. It stares out, high-roofed with a slightly tragic air over its grey-green water carpet. There was a fearful massacre here in 1418.
Eight rosetted Michelin eating places lie within half an hour's jaunt of Tours. Azay doesn't have one. Fontevraud has the Licorne and a very adequate small hotel, the Croix Blanche, with menus from £25 and rooms at about £40. Fontevraud Abbey, a favourite haunt of mine, has been so shiningly restored it has lost its sense of 900 years of history. This is the restorer's dilemma; do you return a building to how it looked when first built or to how the modern world remembers it?
Under autocratic blue-blooded abbesses, Fontevraud ruled over five religious 'houses' including one for 'fallen women'. Its linked establishments stretched deep into southern England and northern Spain. Twice the place was shattered in the mad cause of religion. By the Huguenots in 1561, then by the Revolutionaries. Napoleon restored it. France now is spending millions on it.
They've moved our King Henry II, his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, their son Richard Lion Heart and King John's wife Isabella from a side chapel into the body of the immense, white, echoing church. A remote ancestor of mine used to lie close by his monarch, Henry II, but where his tomb was is now glossed over. Our clever half-Dutch guide remembered his vanished tombstone and is trying to discover where that antique Herbert now lies.
The Loire's southern country roads have the dithering charm of English lanes. It's a different world from the Roman and Napoleonic highways which arrow across the plains of northern France. Here little roads meander between vineyards, maize, sunflowers and more vineyards. They squeeze through pretty, grey-stone hamlets following the Route Touris-tique des Vignobles. Pretty, grape-bunch roadsigns lead the way.
Tiny shops sell home-made honey. In a bar beneath a ruined castle the young patron presses glasses of pink bernache on us. This is grape juice plus a little wine and rather delicious in a puddingy way. We lunch in Chinon in the Maison Rouge, a timbered, old restaurant, leaning outward like the poop of a Tudor galleon. Almost next door below the castle is a house in which Richard Coeur de Lion probably died. A wound from a sniper's arrow, when he was checking on his soldiers, turned septic.
The patron of the Maison Rouge was a Parisian. Influenced by oriental dishes, he has evolved a menu whereby you pick half a dozen small starters from a score of dishes, plus just one grill for about £18. Idea good; execution dreary. He calls it Rabelaisian. This multitalented, coarse-writing old author, lawyer and doctor Rabelais was born nearby at La Deviniere. This little farmyard in a dull valley isn't worth the journey. Anyway, Rabelais was actually born in a field with his mother dying in the process.
We should have spent longer wine-tasting at the Domaine Daniel Chauveau at Cravant-les-Coteaux. The handsome young wine master is the son of the house and married to an English girl from Romsey, Hampshire. Their 25 acres billow away over an emerald ocean of vines.
It is part of the rapidly expanding 5,000 acres of Chinon Vineyards. The main grape is Cabernet-Franc, fragrant and smoothed in new oak barrels. The older, the richer, the smoother.
'Good Chinon really lasts,' says Christophe Chauveau, raving over a '47 he had recently relished. In their cellars a big family group was bottling, from its own cask, its own wine by a hand-cranked, old machine. I wanted to order a few cases of the '96. But 'it's all sold. Last year's and this, too. We export 50 per cent. The UK takes 25 per cent'. All along the Loire I find a swelling pride in their wines and the conviction that this area is moving up to challenge Bordeaux and Burgundy.
Echoes of a Celtic past
Overlooking the miles of salt pans stands medieval Guerande, still encircled by its stout city walls. And deeper inland, lost among the low-lying fields, lie the marshlands of La Briere - a Gallic version of the Norfolk Broads - where every cottage is thatched with reeds and boatmen will take you exploring down the peaty canals in their traditional flat-bottomed punts.
It's well worth spending a day here, if only to lunch at the Auberge de Breca, near St Lyphard, and sample the authentic marshland treats on offer: roast goose, frogs' legs or maybe a dish of stewed eel garnished with parsley.
As in Cornwall, the Breton countryside is haunted by its Celtic past. The fields bristle with standing stones. Many of the place names - Trescalan, Pen ar Ran, Kerguenec - would not look out of place in Cornwall, and the fishing port of Piriac-sur-Mer reminded me of St Ives. Even the lie of the land itself - the reefs and rock pools, the mossy oaks and ferny hedgebanks - is as Cornish as clotted cream.
On my last day I drove across the salt marshes towards La Turballe once more, then doubled back down the narrow sandspit of Pen Bron to sunbathe in the dunes. From here I could watch the tide running out in the estuary until only a thin blue line of water remained, its winding channel marked by wooden posts and watchful herons. It was unbelievably peaceful.
Across the bay the white gable ends of Le Croisic's harbourside houses gleamed in the sharp Atlantic light. Curlews called from the tide's edge and far out on the wave-wet sands cockle-pickers were strolling, filling buckets with shellfish for a free evening meal. But in all that immense vista of dazzling sunshine, sand and sea, they were the only people in sight.
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| | | | Keeping the kids amused
Small children don't want to traipse around chateaux all day, so here are some great ideas for keeping them amused.
Take them to the Maison de la Magie in Blois, a new museum of magic featuring rooms full of tricks and the history of famous magicians, including Robert-Houdin, the famous French illusionist who invented the son et lumiere. Super auditorium with an excellent magic show.
Cut the chateaux down to size at the Parc Mini-Chateaux in Amboise: see more than 40 models of all the famous chateaux in one child-friendly swoop.
Escape the history lessons for a trip to Futuroscope - the museum of the moving image - only an hour down the motorway at Poitiers.
For fairytale enchantment, visit the Chateau d'Usse, said to be the inspiration for The Sleeping Beauty. The story is told in tableaux as you move from room to room.
Choose a campsite with lots of facilities for children: ours had swimming pools, a waterchute, football, tennis and table tennis, a play area, bike hire and pony rides. Look for extra attractions in the chateaux grounds: horse displays and boating at Chambord; hound feeding at Cheverny (5pm daily); train rides and boat trips at Chenonceau. And finally, for parents, try the animated wine museum at Chinon.
Wine tasting
We slept in Saumur in the old-fashioned hotel Anne d'Anjou between the chateaux and the river. Good views from both sides of a creaking, understaffed but characterful hotel (marvellous staircase). But the river means the road and the road means zapping motorbikes.
Just behind the hotel we dined in Les Menestrels - and not very well; greasy food, slow service, one poor fatigued waiter. It was preceded by tastings of local wines made by what used to be called the 'Methode Champenoise'. The champagne boys banned the use of this adjective. Actually, this turns out better for the Loire 'fizzies' it no longer makes themsound second rate. But the winemaking method remains the same.
I've never liked champagne, except for, perhaps, the very best. There's too much second-class stuff around; too sharp, too green-apple skinned, too busily gassy. I was offered a '97 red Saumur off old vines for a mere £2.20 a bottle plus local taxes and about £1 a bottle transport to England.
But the Loire also produces not only very fine whites and rapidly improving reds but, as we tasted to our delight at Chateau de Fesles, south of Angers, some superb developments from that ancient grape, the Chenin Blanc. With this, these maestri are making a range of delights from fresh lightweights to the glorious Bonnezeaux which, in its delicious complexities, knocks spots off most of Bordeaux's sweet, pudding wines. And, so far, much cheaper.
We lunched in a troglodyte restaurant, Les Caves de Gen-evraie. Some of these caves are normally inhabited, not by trogs or paupers, but simply because it suits. I found the gloom and guttering candles gimmicky and claustrophobic. But the fresh, hot loaves baked by the patron in the next cave are delicious. You cram on butter and coarse terrine as soon as you can bear to hold the hot bread. Local reds wash it down.
The fame of Chateau de Fesles is such that if you are going round the superb five-storeyed Chateau de Brissac, the young energetic Marquis de Brissac will remark in his fluent English: 'After de Fesles you won't want to taste ours!' The Chateau de Brissac, gazing haughtily over its lake, has been in his family since 1502. It hasn't been altered since 1621. The family have been waging a long war simply to repair it.
'Now I want to make here an English garden,' said the Marquis. He learned his English staying on school holidays on Colonsay off Scotland's west coast. He and his father, the present Duc, farm the estate, keep horses, make wine and take in rich paying guests in a lodge in gigantic splendour.
As a group of wealthy Americans came down the grand staircase, a posse of horsemen back from the races at Angers came in for drinks in the glorious, tapes-tried drawing room under its richly painted beamed ceiling. Unmissable, and so close is the lovely Loire.
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| | Available rental properties in Loire |
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| |  | | Vergnon I
4 fully renovated, bordered gites in the added building of a farm on a big forestry property. In the centre of France (north of St-Etienne), in a comp
|  | | Vergnon II
4 fully renovated, bordered gites in the added building of a farm on a big forestry property. In the centre of France (north of St-Etienne), in a comp
|  | | Vergnon III
4 fully renovated, bordered gites in the added building of a farm on a big forestry property. In the centre of France (north of St-Etienne), in a comp
|  | | Vergnon 4
4 fully renovated, bordered gites in the added building of a farm on a big forestry property. In the centre of France (north of St-Etienne), in a comp
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