After starting with Chenonceaux the previous day, we went to see more castles this day after a nice French breakfast at our chateau hotel :)

Chateau de Chambord is just huge and magnificent. Freaking big is about the right word, and it's arguably the second best Castle in France after Versailles. It was built and grown over a few centuries and was where the French Kings went on vacation, although they never stayed too long because Paris was more convenient for them. The gardens were nice, despite the light rain.

double helix stairs in the middle, just like DNA

We stopped at a chocolate store that happened to be on the way with samples to try :)

Cheverny was smaller, but very nice inside too. The part I didn't know was that the chateau and nearby city were used as the background for Tintin, a great comic I read as a kid. They had an expo on that which was fun to visit while Jennifer was sampling local wine as she does best :)

The tintin expo was definitely worth the visit:

even the characters were based on real people

While I was looking at tintin, Jennifer found a new wine tasting place iwth a high tech delivery system :)

We then drove by Chaumont sur Loire, but didn't enter it after some reviews I read saying that the inside didn't look good, but I took a few pictures from outside:

We used the time to go to Clos Lucé instead, the not so great small castle where the king François 1er hosted Leonardo the Vinci for the last 3 years of his life and just paid him to do whatever he felt like. In other words, the king recognized Leonardo as a genius and gave him free reign to invent and study whatever he felt like. They have cool demos of some of Leonardo's revolutionary inventions.

he invented the first tank

he also figured out the first parachute

his idea of a helicopter, only missing an appropriate powerplant and counter rotating rear prop

water pump without vaccuum or motors

the bearing

secret underground passage to the chateau d'amboise

This gave us enough time to walk back to downtown Amboise, walk by its chateau that did not have the time to visit but wasn't that great from what we heard anyway, and got a few pictures outside around sunset before heading back to our Chateau hotel for the night.