Chantilly

I'm late with updates again, but David and I went to Chantilly last weekend.

I was getting a little city poisoning, and wanted to get out of Paris for a day, so we thought we'd make the drive out to Chantilly, which is about 45 minutes from Paris. We had visited the Chantilly château for the Nuits de Feu earlier in the year, but didn't get a chance to see the château or the infamous stables.

The weather was a bit gray and brisk, which turned out to be advantage because there were not a lot of other tourists. We had plenty of quiet and elbow room to take photos and stop to appreciate different parts of the estate. At one point a guide rounded us up for a private tour of some restricted apartments, which was pretty impressive. I wish I could have understood what he was saying better, but Dave seemed to get the general idea. For me, it went something like this:

"And here we have a painting of the famous Jean-Baptiste, holding a symbolic -------- in his right hand, and a --------- in his left hand, which is important because ----------."

After we'd had enough of the château, we crossed the grounds to the stables. On the way we stopped for gaufres, which are French waffles, with chantilly cream on them. Chantilly cream is the French equivalent of whipped cream, and was invented by the Chantilly chef for the royal princes living there in the 17th century.

All this history and I dropped mine after two bites.

Anyway, as we walked to the stables we passed a horse jumping competition and stopped to watch for a few minutes. We saw a horse panic and put on the brakes instead of jumping a gate. Thanks to wikipedia, I now know the technical term for this is a "refusal". David compared it to a Scooby Doo cartoon.

At the stables we wandered through the massive halls and visited the variety of privileged horses living there. Apparently, the story behind the stables is that Louis Henri, one of the Princes of Condé, believed that he would be reincarnated as a horse. So he directed the architect to build stables befitting for him.

I enjoyed the stables more than the château, I think, because after a while châteaux all start looking the same. How often do you see horse stables with velvet curtains?

Beyond the stables was an extensive horse museum, with every sort of bridle, spur, and hobby horse imaginable on display. We got bored with that soon enough and wandered out to the gardens behind estate.

The grounds were very expansive, and mostly deserted. We walked along a path and found ourselves on a small causeway leading to the "Ile d'Amour", the Island of Love. It was just a quiet little garden area with some late blooming roses bushes and a statue, but we had it to ourselves and spent some time taking photos.

Dave even humored me for a photo on the Ile d'Amour

From there we were a bit tired, so we hiked back through the gardens to the car. And, as usual, I slept on the drive home.