Leonardo da Vinci

Today was an absolutely lovely day. Weatherwise, it started off cold (low 40s) then climbed to the upper 60s. Our only planned activity was to visit Chateau du Clos Luce, a manor home behind the Chateau d’Amboise we visited yesterday. This is the home where the great painter, architect, civil engineer and inventor, Leonardo di Vinci, spent the last 3 years of his life.

These are the rooms he used as his workshop. Here are some of the pics.

Leonardo brought these two paintings, along with the Mona Lisa, with him to the Manor House.

Leonardo designed many things that were ahead of his time, including the parachute, tank, machine gun, automobile and plane. Here’s a picture of his model for the tank.

Here was his idea of an airplane.

One of the rooms contained a hologram video. It was in French, so we don’t know what it was about, but it was still pretty cool.

After visiting the house, we walked around the expansive garden. By this time the temp was up and it was gorgeous out.

One of the outbuildings had a large room with information about his scientific studies, cities he helped design and his inventions. Of course, Peter read every word on every plaque which is when I took the opportunity to upload pictures to the blog.

Have you ever seen the Immersive van Gogh exhibit? I’ve seen it twice and it was amazing. Anyway, they had a much shorter version of that about Leonardo’s work. It was very good. Here’s a small snippet.

At the far end of the garden, we found a building that was a 16th century inn.

After spending at least an hour roaming the garden, we headed back to the car for the 5-minute drive to the city center. Here we walked along the Loire River, enjoying the beautiful day.

We wandered the pedestrian street until we came to a creperie where, of course, we had to stop for a snack.

Once home, we enjoyed wine in the garden.

We ate cold, leftover pizza for dinner and played a few rousing rounds of Rummikub before getting settled for the night.

We thoroughly enjoyed our 2 days here and loved meeting our host Martine. What a delightful woman. When she found out we had dirty laundry, not only did she volunteer her washer, but she insisted on doing it herself. I was perfectly happy to run the load myself, but she told us to leave, and she would do it for us. Above and beyond the call of a B&B hostess.

The house is veritable menagerie with 5 chickens, 5 cats, 2 ducks 3 rabbits, 2 hedgehogs and a dog. Only a couple of cats and the dog were inside the house, and they never bothered us, but it was wonderful to hear her talk about her pets.

As much fun as we had here, we’re looking forward to our next stop….Lascaux Caves where we’ll see reproductions of the Neanderthal cave paintings. It will be fun.