Famous chateaux in the Paris region are fairly common: Versailles (been there, done that, at least three times), Fontainebleau (which always makes me think of Madeleine and the Gypsies), and Chantilly, which has as its claim to fame that chantilly, or sweetened whipped cream, was invented there. (There are, of course, others, but that will do to start with.) Of course, there are all sorts of places claiming credit, and I suspect that the real inventors of the stuff will probably never be known, but at any rate the people at Chantilly made the stuff famous, and that is good enough for me.
Since we'd been to Versailles before, and we'd all been to Fontainebleau at various points, we decided that our chateau of the year would be Chantilly, which is actually not in the Île-de-France at all, but rather in Picardie (which seems like it would be a lovely name for a pet of some type) which means that you have to take a real train (instead of a metro or RER or Transilien) for an entire 19 minute ride in order to get there.
But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. Here is how we ended up at Chantilly.
Ezio decided that he wanted to go to a castle or palace or something like that while we were in France. I think that in his ideal world, we would probably have gone someplace like this, but castles dedicated to the art of medieval warfare are somewhat rarer in Paris, and so we ended up on Saturday evening after the kids were in bed, having a discussion about where we should go the next day. Naturally, the first place that was mentioned was Versailles, but we've been there quite often, as have the kids, and the weather was supposed to be sketchy, sort of, and we didn't really want to be walking between the main house and the Petit Trianon in the pouring rain, so that was out. Then we talked about Fontainebleau, which the kids had been to with me six years ago, when they were really quite young, and decided that it sounded like too much of a hassle to get there, what with needing to take a bus to the Gare de Lyon and then buy tickets to Fontainebleau and then take a train there and then catch a bus from the Gare de Fontainebleau to the chateau. So, Chantilly it was. Of course, that required taking a metro to a train to a bus, and the train that we wanted only ran every two hours in the morning, and there was the issue of getting to mass at some point during the day. (Is this seeming overly complicated yet?)
At last we determined that if we took the 9:10 train to Chantilly we should get there around 9:30. We would be able to get breakfast there from a bakery and buy our tickets to the chateau before we went to 11 AM mass at Notre Dame de l'Assomption de Chantilly and then we could go into the proper grounds of the chateau after mass and see the house and the grounds and maybe we would also see the Musée Vivant du Cheval (Living Horse Museum) at some point. So we went to bed and dragged the kids out of bed at 8:00 and made them get dressed so that we could trek to the RER station at Notre Dame and ride to the Gare du Nord where we would buy Transilien tickets to Chantilly. Of course when we got there, we discovered that Chantilly is not on the Transilien and that we would have to go to an actual ticket counter and get things figured out, but not until after a great deal of silently cursing the ticket machines that refused to show Chantilly as a possible destination, then arrived in Chantilly to discover that hardly any of the buses were actually running, which I guess shouldn't have been a surprise on a Sunday morning, but somehow was. We did eventually find a bus that took us to the chateau, and a bakery that was open and managed to buy our tickets into the chateau and see the horses in the museum and make it to mass, more or less as planned.
After mass we headed back to the chateau grounds, and toured the chateau itself. Think art, lots of art, and ornamented ceilings and stuff like that. Then back to the bakery for sandwiches for lunch, which they made after we ordered them (much, I am sure, to the chagrin of the people waiting in line behind us). And then it started to rain. While, I might add, we were sitting outside in a courtyard eating our sandwiches. With no sign of shelter in sight. Mmm, soggy bread and ham.
So we finished our sandwiches and went back to the horse museum and learned about the history of horses and hoped that it would stop raining so that we could go out and explore the gardens. And it did stop raining. Four times. (Maybe more, there weren't a lot of windows.) Once, it even stopped raining for a whole minute. So, back into the museum we went, and learned about spurs. And bits. And the use of horses during Napoleon's campaigns. And carousels. And did I mention spurs? (By this point I would have welcomed some trebuchets or bombards almost as much as Ezio would have.)
It did, eventually, stop raining and we wandered through the English garden, only to discover (as it started raining again upon our departure) that the buses might or might not be running that afternoon and that if they were we would have a significant wait (in the rain) for them to arrive and so we ended up walking the 2 km back to the station in the rain.
No comments:
Post a Comment