Hey, Leo, Are You Home?

On our last day in the Loire Valley, we visited the town of Amboise and strolled through the streets of the old town.  There are a lot of troglodyte dwellings in the area, homes carved out of the cliffside.  These can vary from crude and simple to quite new and modern.  There was a variety of architectural styles including half-timbered houses that were no longer perpendicular after hundreds of years.  Amboise is the town where Leonardo da Vinci was said to have lived out the last years of his life at a rather nice house built for him by Francois I, a great admirer of his.  Supposedly there was a tunnel from the chateau to Leo's house for convenient get-togethers.  The grounds of the estate are park-like with beautiful landscaping and wooded trails.

After we left Leo's house, we walked through the streets of the old town of Amboise and under the clock tower.  There were lots of shops and restaurants and one in particular really interested me - can you tell what I'm looking at?

I was very polite when this Westie gave me the "petit bonjour."

 So it was time to head for the train station.  Mom put me in the carrier to wait for the train and after a short wait, it arrived.  Unfortunately, there had been a problem with another train, so they had to put a lot of passengers on our train that weren't supposed to be there.  That meant I had to sit on the floor!  But it only took an hour to get back to Paris, and about that long to wait in line for a taxi, when, before you knew it - voila! - we were home.  I was so happy to be back in a place where I've spent two months that I grabbed my bunny and squeaked it all over the house!