La Roche-Guyon – Tour of the most beautiful villages in France 2011 No.1 -★★☆☆☆

Date of visit: April 17, 2011, 2:00 p.m.

Now, I’ll start writing this report again this year. This is a tour of the « Most Beautiful Villages in France », which I went to last year as well.

And as I have already mentioned, I have decided to include an « evaluation » chart from this year. I can’t say it’s an objective evaluation, and the standard may change depending on my mood, but I hope it conveys a certain atmosphere.

By the way, visiting « the most beautiful villages in France » is basically based on the premise of traveling by car. Of course, there are some villages that can be visited by public transportation, in which case it is probably easier to get there by car, so there is no doubt that you will get 5 stars.

Now, the first village we visited this time is « La Roche-Guyon ». It is probably the closest village from Paris among the most beautiful villages in France.

First of all, we rented a car at Montparnasse station in Paris. We arrived on the 16th, the day before, and started our journey by car as soon as possible the next day.

I decided to go here because I could suddenly drive in Paris, but this was one of my biggest mistakes. I couldn’t choose the car model at all…. Even though we were in France, we could only rent an Opel.

But still, it’s just a short walk from the parking lot to Paris, so let’s bear with it. So, before going to La Roche-Guyon, we drove around Paris! Driving was still a bit awkward, but it was fun. But it was very nerve-wracking because of the traffic situation in the big city.

Familiar every time? I’ve been recording on-board cameras and doing « Imakoko Now » and « Twikas », so the inside of the car looks like this.

I’m getting used to driving, but it was quite difficult to drive a manual car in Paris (*Manual cars are the mainstream in Europe) while paying attention to the signal.

Now, we can’t stay in Paris that long, so we join the highway towards Rouen to the first beautiful village at the end of the day. If you don’t get lost, you can reach the first village in less than an hour.

On the way, we bought some water and snacks and moved northwest on the highway.

After getting off the train, we took a few wrong turns, but we arrived at La Roche-Guyon, the first beautiful village of this trip.

Thanks to the fact that it was Sunday and there were many tourists in the small village, we had a hard time parking, but we happened to be able to park in the square in the center of town (not so big though).

This is the first standard photo shoot of this trip.

So, this is the village. This village looks as if this picture shows everything. The impressive chateau and the fort are the main attractions. Let’s go there as soon as possible.

At the entrance of the chateau, buy a ticket at the building on the right.

There seems to be a concert by the students of the music school after this. I wanted to listen to it if I had time.

Many young people with musical instruments, probably students, were seen. Some of them seemed to be Japanese.

Now, let’s go inside. A part of the hall looked like this. A performer was practicing his cello in the next room.

The chapel inside the castle, or was it a chapel? It’s the same thing.

Then we go to the fort. You can go to the fort from the inside of the castle, but it’s a very steep staircase.

Each step is very high, so it uses a lot of leg muscles. I was confident about my physical strength because I had run a marathon even though it had been a while, but I was still quite out of breath. Phew….

But we did our best to reach the top, and here is the view.