5: Vincennes, Chartres

This’ll mostly be pictures. We went to a chateau called Vincennes, which was very cool. Shown here is just the donjon (keep) inside the castle

Wednesday, we took a train to Chartres, a small town near Paris with basically the coolest and best preserved medieval cathedral in Europe.

While there, we got to walk around with a guy named Malcolm Miller–he came to Chartres from England to write his thesis on the Cathedral, and never left. He is now 85. Instead of giving us a superficial tour of the whole place, he went super in depth (probably still a grossly superficial review for him) on a dozen or so windows, statues, etc. just to show how rich the site is. Since the Cathedral is quiet inside, he spoke to us with nifty headsets through a mike.
I was blown away–the amount of detail and backstory in each little thing was overwhelming. There are hundreds of windows, most of which are 50 square meters of detail, all representing religious backstory. Many being over 800 years old, they represent Christian traditions and stories many of which never made it into the printed bible (some windows were all about Jesus’s exploits in Egypt as a child, for example). Below is a pic of the Baroque center altar, which clashes with the surrounding gothic style but is beautiful on its own
At lunch we explored the lovely town with its even lovelier food

After we took a tour of the crypts (the oldest of which dates from the Roman era) and climbed the highest tower for a great view–almost 300 steps, and that isn’t even all the way to the top.

It was a long day