just another morning here

We looked at the weather forecast yesterday and it looked as though today was going to be rainy again, so we tried to be clever and plan something with indoor options as well. Came up with the idea of going to the Chateau de Breteuil, which looked good from the leaflet.

When we arrived it was still dry, and, suspecting rain would arrive later in the afternoon, we decided to walk through the gardens first so that we could go and do the chateau tour later on if it rained. Typically, we were at about the furthest point of the gardens when it started pouring down with rain – so we got very wet and cold walking back up through the forest. Of course this was in the lunch hour as well, so the next chateau tour wasn’t for ages! Found a crepe stand ideally situated by the play area, so the kids played in the rain after eating a nice hot pancake

The chateau tour itself was fantastic, I would highly recommend it. The leaflets in different languages had most of the important detail for each room in them; I translated the tour guide (very roughly) for whoever was standing next to me, and Steve just skulked at the back looking nonplussed It was actually a really interesting tour, introduced by a member of the Breteuil family himself, who then handed the group over to a tour guide who I thought was excellent at sticking plenty of detail in but making sure the children stayed involved as well. The family has a long history of friendship with and service to the French royal family so there was lots of interest there, as well as in the family history. Most rooms had some waxwork figures in them, as well as the usual paintings/books/furniture to look at, not to mention numerous ‘Puss in Boots’ characters to look for throughout the castle.

In the outbuildings of the chateau were various tableaux from French fairy tales by Perrault – some of which we are familiar with, but others we didn’t know, so it was kind of interesting to try and work them out (although they seemed pretty surreal, a couple of them anyway!). By mid-afternoon the rain had stopped again, so we wandered around the chateau grounds a little bit more. Abbie and Josiah found a cat that they sat and played with for ages, and Steve has promised Abbie that if we ever buy a house/castle with a moat, we can get some white deer to live in the moat … very likely, not!

Anyway, back at the campsite we are playing DS, reading, blogging, and trying to dry out, thank goodness we have a heater as it is pretty cold for August and none of our towels etc. are drying otherwise! Still, the weather for the week ahead looks good, so we’re looking forward to a sunny final week.