"A Good Place to Start Visiting Chateaux " a Angers Travel Page by hquittner

Angers is a goodly sized city (150K pop.) astride the Maine River just North of the Loire. At its center just beyond the river are its two top attractions (among many others): the Chateau and the Cathedral St.-Maurice. Surrounding these are an old town. The sights will fill an entire day (or more). We did our only visit as a day trip by car from our base 20 miles north in Anjou (see below).

20 years ago, at last children-free, we decided to spend the ensuing 7 years of vacations sightseeing in selected areas of France. Almost our first selection was the Loire Valley area. In those days there was no Internet. Guidebooks were superficial (except for Michelins, most of which were in French and hard to obtain). Luckily we found a new, obscure , helpful travel agency in N.Y.C. (frenchexperience.com), who helped us self-plan (their specialty in those days) a self-drive adventure. At that time, before TGV, it was the only way to go and as we see it today, this is still true.

A new type of accomodation presented itself. We had already experieced Pousadas and Paradores (in Portugal and Spain) and were ready expecting the same, except this was much better! We stayed at two chateaux for 3 nights each (plus one small inn) situated along the Loire (and not in cities). From these we mapped our daily and intervening chateaux and towns. Our hosts at the chateaux were helpful with maps, advice and instructions. At each venue we reserved table d'hote dinners or ate from a menu. (See our Hotel Tip under P.de Loire>La Jaille-Yvon for Angers and Centre>Chateau de Colliers for near Chambord. In the intervening years, we have rarely seen mention of this delightful way to be a tourist, although similar opportunites exist all over France and even Germany and Italy; but we have done this repeatedly (see the web sites for groups of them).