Harvey Travel Arts

"We want...a shrubbery!" If you've ever seen Monty Python, you'll know what I'm talking about. My senior year in high school, I transferred to public school and we watched that movie in our creative writing class. Now you know where your hard earned tax dollars are going. Anyway, the perfectly trimmed hedges at a chateaux in the Loire Valley made me giggle. One wonders if they were trimmed in such a way as to amuse us all, or if it is simply aesthetically pleasing... I'm sure a lot of care and attention goes into keeping them nice and neat, and that someone gets frustrated over these things when one doesn't shape up as well as the others. (see the little sad one in the front on the right?). Anyway, I hope I've provided a little laugh for you today. If not, I'm terribly sorry...Shrubbery!

Sometimes I wonder why my ceilings don't look like this. Or my windows? I guess nobody wanted to hand lay the beams, carve the designs and paint intricate details the day my rented town home was being built. Perhaps the stained glass contractor was sick that day, or on vacation, and that is why my windows are large, plain-jane square boxes. Instead of wooden shutter doors, my windows have the German style roll down shades, which are nice, convenient, but still plain. I actually like the simplicity of my house, but I sometimes like to think about the skill these builders must have had. No modern design programs on computers, but rather paper, hands and talent.

On the grounds of the Leonardo da Vinci Clos Luce house, there was this large structure which housed pigeons. Pigeons! Each of the black box shaped holes was a space for the birds. I am amazed that such a place was built. It housed about a thousand pigeons. I cannot fathom the time and effort servants must have spent building such a place, just for housing birds! During this time in history, pigeons were valuable not only for food, but for communication, feathers and of course, fertilizing! They were often bestowed as gifts and were greatly valued. I cannot imagine receiving a pigeon as a gift today--I'd probably thank the person, but then search for a new home for the bird. It just shows the vast differences in society over the years.

I was flipping through pictures of Leonardo da Vinci's inventions and decided this would be the most interesting one to choose. I'm not even sure I remember what this was, exactly, except that I was like a kid on a playground as I climbed inside and turned the wheel. It kind of reminds me of those carnival rides where you go inside and spin around with the rock music blaring...or perhaps a hatch for the 'others' on "Lost." And then, there's this: the human hamster wheel. I really was curious, but no, there was no way to actually climb into it, lawsuits and all that. There was a lever you could push, and it rotated some, but the fun was quickly left behind, my attention span not lasting so long. Really, now, why do they put these "shineys" up there for us to look at if half of them are going to be roped off or inoperable? Where's the fun in that?