A wider angle

Here is a wider view of the staircase from yesterday's post. It's a spiral, external to the building, but inside the northeast courtyard. It serves, if I remember correctly, the logis or royal wing where the king's apartments are.

A stairway in the logis royale at Chambord, July 2013.

Again, the people on the lower walkway provide some scale.

We had a humdinger of a thunderstorm last night, between about midnight and 01h30. The strong winds and lightning flashes woke me up. I made the rounds inside the house, battening down the hatches, as it were. We weren't really expecting a storm. One of the weather sites I look at has a five hour loop of the lightning strikes in France, so I checked it out this morning. It looked like the storm split around us mostly on the west, but also on the east. I counted six to eight "Mississippis" between lightning flashes and thunderclaps, indicating that the lighting was a little less than two miles a way (five seconds equal about a mile). It sounded like it was all around us, but not on top of us. The storm eventually moved on to our north and I fell back to sleep. Ken slept through most of it, Tasha took refuge on the bed a couple of times.