“She has a tower?”

No, not exactly, but she'd like one! J Maybe someday… But Angers certainly had plenty of towers to spare!

Angers, or at least the Angers Chateau, has something like 17 towers! It's crazy! But so cool, because you can walk around the entire wall and can walk on top of all the towers. Granted, the towers aren't that high, but the walls are so thick that this would have been one of the hardest fortresses to break into! Should you and your army be in the neighborhood and looking for a fortress to capture, this would not be the one at which to try your luck! Despite its great military reputation, the fortress is a gorgeous safe haven for legendary gardens and tapestries.

Angers is home to an old chapel from the 11^th or 12^th century. The wall has a couple painted sections, but other than that it's pretty bare. I liked it, but I liked the outside of the castle more.

Walking along the wall was amazing! You could see the whole city, including the river. I love views from castle walls. The city surrounding a castle usually as so many old houses and shops, with tiny, winding streets paved in cobblestone. Each house is different and they all look hundreds and hundreds of years old. It would be like stepping back into the Middle Ages, were it not for the cars careening around corners and honking wildly. (Ok, that's an overstatement. Sometimes. But a lot of people drive crazy around here!)

My favorite part was the flowers. Flowers and bushes grew everywhere! All over the rock walls, in the garden, in the courtyard. The garden of the castle has been there since medieval times, and people still tend it today. It was in these gardens that one of the kings of France (I think) wooed a girl named Fleurte (or something similar to that) with "flowery" language, according to our audio guide. The French named this flowery language after the girl it was directed to, which came down through the years as the verb "flirter" which I assume is where we got the word "flirt". If the audio guide is to be believed… It may or may not be an accurate source, you can never tell. But anyway, bottom line is I was in the place where flirting started. Lol. Or at least was named.

Another amazing part of the castle was the bathrooms!!! Maybe I was just a little nice-bathroom deprived, but I thoroughly enjoyed the restrooms at Angers. They were very clean for being castle restrooms. (Restrooms I saw in Paris were gross!!! Even in museums!) And the sinks were a work of genius! Instead of having to touch a disgusting faucet to turn the water on and off, thus getting your hand all dirty again right after washing, you worked the sink with a little lever by your knee! The downside was you couldn't really adjust the temperature, but the water wasn't very cold! I loved it. Sigh. J And the soap smelled so good, too!

The other cool part of Angers was the tapestry that outlined the Book of Revelation from the Bible. There were so many tapestries! And each was so detailed! I loved seeing all the symbolism they used. And I thought it was funny, because these tapestries were made during the 100 Years War, and in a lot of the devils scenes or wicked scenes, they had English kings or English soldiers. Lol. The tapestries were so well-preserved, it was hard to believe some of them were made several hundred years ago.

The next stop was Langais, a cute little chateau where Anne of Bretagne married…Charles something, king of France to unite Bretagne with France. It wasn't a splendid castle, but it was definitely one that felt more like a home than a fortress. You wouldn't actually get lost in that place. Lol. Unlike so many castles… I liked it because it showed a lot of the everyday life at that time. There was a room with a bunch of children's stuff in it that I thought was so interesting! They had a medieval highchair and a medieval walker! Lol. Along with a cradle and things like that. Who knew they had walkers in the Middle Ages? That tour was also fun because we all went around together as a group and somebody from the group read a card about each room we went to. Following the tour, we took group pictures and walked around the ruins behind the castle.

Dinner was so fancy that night! We had at least four courses. Appetizers, which were a bunch of little quiches and toasts with chicken or tuna (we couldn't tell which) and cream puffs with some sort of fish and little pieces of bread with some sort of meat and tomato on it. And the bread they gave us for in between was fresh! Usually restaurants, even nice restaurants, give you bread that isn't so out-of-the-oven fresh that it crinkles when you squeeze it. The juice was really good to, even though I would have liked it a little sweeter. I didn't love the salad course, but I ate it all. Lol. It was a sandwich made of thin, cracker-like things (more like wafers with a bunch of seeds and stuff in them) with shrimp and a salad stuff in between. It wasn't nasty, but it definitely didn't make my list of stuff to try recreating. The salad part was good, though. They had chips made from some sort of squash and sweet potato? I'm not exactly sure. They were purple and orange. For the main course, we had veal (adding to my list of unusual meats, at least for Americans) and potato pancakes and a dumpling and a squash puree. It was ok… A little strange, because it was all in a cinnamon sauce. (At least, I think it was cinnamon. Maybe brown sugar, I can't remember.) I ate everything except the puree. I ate a couple bites of that, but….it tastes kinda like sweet potatoes, and those make me gag. Lol. Like, I can't make myself eat them. Not just I really don't like to eat them, I can't eat them. They don't go down my throat. Lol.

Then dessert was awesome! It was really thin pistachio cookies with orange crème and strawberries in the middle and a scoop of raspberry basil ice cream. The basil was kinda weird, but I liked it.

We stayed at a Premiere Classe hotel, which wasn't so premiere classe, but hey, we had our own bathrooms and the shower was even in the same room as the toilet, which made the bathroom really tiny, but that's ok. Lol. I enjoyed it. And we had internet! Another huge plus…7