Sunday, August 28, 2011

French Odyssey....part 2







After eating and drinking to our fill at our friends , it was time to hit the road heading southwest to the Loire Valley near Tours on the next leg of our journey. First we stopped for provisions at the largest Carrefour hypermarket in France (big mistake)..In a place the size of a small village they had car parking spaces for thousands of cars, but only four spaces for anything over 2.5m (thats us at 2.6m)..I must have driven round dozens of times whilst Laura went through the slowest checkout in Europe. Anyhow after our false start we were soon on our way on a mixture of main roads and toll motorways. Now toll booths are fun as most are automated and the calculate the cost based on the size of your vehicle (loads of sensors).. and they have two payment slots one at car level and one at truck level. You can guess which one it wanted us to use, this involved Laura leaning out of the window and contorting herself just to reach the payment slot (not good for your back). Despite these niggles we had a steady journey of about 180 miles to " Chateau Nitray" in the Loire valley.





The Chateau was part of the "France Passion" scheme, where each year you buy a book with thousands of farms/ vineyards ect listed, which allow campervans to stay overnight FREE. This Chateau had its own vineyard (where we camped) and of course sold their own label wine. Before long Laura was rustling up dinner whilst me and Joel checked out the "shop"....Some wine tasting ensued and I staggerd back to the van with a few bottles of their finest produce. A very mellow evening ensued as the sun set over the vineyard with some rather comical attempts of climbing into the hightop for some much needed zzz's. Part 3 .... the final Leg will follow.

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