Chaumont-Sur-Loire

My roommate and I did a Loire Valley Chateaux drive last Thursday. We went to three castles and had a beautiful day for sight-seeing. The first castle we saw is called Chaumont-Sur-Loire. It definitely takes the cake for most random castle ever. I really liked it from the outside, but inside wasn’t that great. There was artwork everywhere. It seemed like instead of restoring the castle, they just decided to use it as an art museum. There were random displays everywhere. At one point we found a room that was lit with neon lighting and had a model city. Completely and utterly random. It must have been there from the previous owners because it definitely wasn’t really old. The phrase on the wall says “A world that is blowing itself up does not allow its portrait to be painted.” The castle also had all kinds of plants that were decorated with buttons, feathers, lace and jewels.
The castle is known for its garden festival that it has every year. There are lots of different gardens that get designed by different artists. When I first read about it, I thought oh fun, I love gardens. They weren’t at all what I expected. The gardens were each really artsy, not so much with flowers, but with other random objects. It was pretty neat, but there were kids everywhere and it was kind of hot. Plus we only had 6 hours for our 3 chateaux adventure. We left Chaumont and headed on to Cheverny.