Seven Days of Chateaux, Wine, and Actual Walking
Most Loire Valley trips put you on a bus, drive you up to a château, give you ninety minutes, and drive you to the next one. This one puts you on your feet. Over seven days, you're walking between vineyards and villages, staying inside a Renaissance château for three nights and a 17th-century manor for three more, and covering some of the most photographed real estate in France at a pace slow enough to actually notice it.
This is a guided group trip with Exodus Travels, a company whose approach to how they operate is worth its own section below, because it's not just a nice-to-know detail. Walks are graded easy to moderate, four to six miles a day, three to five hours including stops, and every walk is optional if you'd rather sit one out with a glass of something local instead.
You'll arrive at Château de la Bourdaisière, your home for the first three nights, a genuine Renaissance château with 26 rooms, a heated pool, tennis courts, and gardens that make the word "grounds" feel like an understatement. The day is light on purpose: a group welcome briefing, then dinner together as everyone settles in and figures out who they're spending the week with.
Your first real walk, about 5 miles through medieval villages and vineyards in Vouvray, the appellation known for its Chenin Blanc whites. Expect wine cellar visits along the way and, if the timing lines up, a meeting with one of the region's wine brotherhoods, local groups dedicated to preserving Loire winemaking traditions that go back centuries. Breakfast and lunch are included, so this is a full day out with a proper meal built in rather than a rushed picnic.
This is the day people book the trip for. Château de Chenonceau is nicknamed the "Ladies' Château," shaped over the centuries by the women who ran it, most famously Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Medici, and it's the one château in the Loire that actually spans the river itself, a long gallery stretching across the Cher like it was built by someone who wanted to make a point. You'll tour the château, then walk a circular 5.6-mile route along the riverside, which means you get to see Chenonceau both up close and from a distance, arguably the better angle.
A roughly 4.3-mile walk through the Amboise Forest leads to Château Royal d'Amboise, and this is the day to know your history a little. Leonardo da Vinci spent his final years just down the road at Clos Lucé, at the invitation of King Francis I, and he's buried in the château's chapel today. It's a quieter, more contemplative stop than Chenonceau, and it hits differently once you know who's actually resting there.
After Amboise, you'll transfer to Manoir de la Giraudière in Beaumont-en-Véron, a 17th-century manor with 24 rooms and real period furniture, sitting inside a UNESCO World Heritage area. This is home base for your last three nights.
A 4.3-mile walk through the vineyards around Saumur, home to Saumur-Champigny reds and Crémant de Loire, a sparkling wine made the traditional way. You'll visit a wine producer directly rather than a tasting room built for tour groups, and the day includes a stop at Saumur's troglodyte dwellings, homes literally carved into the limestone hillside, some dating back to the Gallo-Roman period and still in use today as houses, restaurants, and small museums. Breakfast and dinner are included, so it's a full day that ends with a real meal instead of scrounging for dinner on your own.
Your last full day covers about 4.3 miles along the banks of the Cher, ending at Château de Villandry, which is famous less for its interior and more for its gardens, tiered, geometric, and meticulously maintained, including an ornamental vegetable garden that's as much art installation as it is produce. You'll also get time at Azay-le-Rideau, a château that seems to rise directly out of the water it's built beside. It's a strong closing day, gardens and architecture instead of one more castle interior.
Breakfast, then the return journey home. Seven days, six nights, two very different places to sleep, and a region you actually walked through instead of watched go by through a bus window.
You'll see "B Corp" mentioned in Exodus's materials for this trip, and it's worth actually explaining rather than letting it sit there as a badge nobody reads.
B Corp certification isn't a marketing label a company can just claim. It's earned through the B Impact Assessment, an independent evaluation covering seven areas: how a company treats its workers, its approach to diversity and equity, human rights, climate action, environmental stewardship, community impact, and broader collective action. The process is audited by a third party, not self-reported, and a company has to legally commit to weighing the interests of workers, customers, and communities alongside profit, not just shareholders. Certification isn't permanent either. Companies have to recertify every five years against standards that keep getting stricter, so it's an ongoing commitment, not a plaque earned once and forgotten.
For this specific trip, that shows up in concrete ways. Exodus tracks and publishes its carbon footprint for this itinerary (9.9kg CO2e per person, per day), takes a "nature positive" approach by rewilding 100 square meters of land for every traveler on their trips, and builds itineraries around meeting the people actually doing the work, the wine brotherhoods preserving Loire winemaking heritage, the family-run producers pouring the tastings themselves. It's not a separate sustainability initiative bolted onto the trip. It's the reason the trip is shaped the way it is: small groups, local producers, walking instead of driving between stops.
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