Veuil

So I spent my last few days in Angers enjoying the heck out of my friends there but also wondering if I was going to hear from my friend Drew as to where the Chateau de Veuil actually was, and how to get there. Saturday morning, as I was getting ready to leave for the train station I was actually looking up names of hostels in Tours, in case I couldn't get a hold of him or Jean-Claude, the proprietor of the chateau. Fortunately, I remembered that on the webpage of the chateau, Jean-Claude had his cell phone number posted. On the seond try I reached him! He and Drew picked me up at a tiny po-dunk train station 45 minutes from Tours, and off we went... to the hardware store for paint (did I mention I'd be working here?) and after, to a little town called St. Aignon, where Jean-Claude stopped off so we could take a quick walk around the chateau there. There was a wedding happening at the chuch at the foot of the stairs to the chateau, but we had a couple of minutes inside the church, so we got the underground tour (J-C knows everyone in the region basically) and saw the wedding party approach. And the chateau was incredibly beautiful. The same family has lived there for hundreds of years. Hard to imagine being that wealthy.
We walked into town only to run into a friend of J-C who had the cake for the wedding in the back of his truck. Turns out he owns and runs the best patisserie in the region. So we stopped and had drinks with him at a café and went to the chateau to start painting. ad a lovely dinner outside in the castle courtyard under a walnut tree and had wine with some neighbors who stopped by. Apparently, that happens almost every night.
The funniest thing is that J-C is one of those people who is totally ADD, super-smart and loves it when someone else takes charge of projects. So we are getting along great. Drew and I painted the newly refurnished kitchen today and the three of us cleaned the house and I love it here. Renaissance era house, Medeival castle ruins, it's fab. We toured the surviving subterranian rooms last night, including an oubliet, yes, just like the one in Labyrinth but without escape route, and saw a bat up close - which was cool. I am psyched to come back here after my Mediterranian trek. More about the chateau later...oh, PS - I changed the setting on my blog so you don't have to log-in to comment. Sorry about that. Please, comment away! I love knowing that people are reading it.