Hotel Du Parc Joue-Les-Tours

... cliff a few times we finally found the campsite.(Damn you GPS) .We are trying to stay away from night driving but when the drive is 5 hours long and its dark by 5pm it gets difficult.

I also remember that France has A LOT of farm land. That’s all we drove through. It’s crazy. Anyway, after a quick stop here it was off to Bordeaux for the real fun to begin!

... that the property holds, but it's what gets put in that comes out. And I'm sure that if you know what to look for you can taste hints of that grace and character in the wine that is made there.

So it's with a heavy heart that I bid farewell to all my friends in France, however briefly we met. There's no way that the times that I've had wont shape the rest of my experiences in my travels, and for that I'm grateful.

From Amboise we had a short drive to Chenonceau where we keen toursits along with one tour group we there early and had to wait 10 minutes until the chateau opened for day. Once through the gates it was a lovely walk through the forest where the leaves were all changing colour - amber, yellow, red - so pretty. As we approach the end of the forest the chateau appears before us and its like stepping into a fairy tale. The chateau sat on ...

... another lot of her famous hamburgers - fine grade meat patties on a french bagette loaded with stinky camembret (yum), tomato, spanish onion and lettuce and of course washed down with a glass or two of Rose - good work! After dinner we went out exploring. A lovely little town of around 10,000 with its chateau on the hill its main attraction. We had read it was best from the outside and so we obliged.
Amboise, Centre, France darrenhough74

... levels. Although, I have to say, it wasn't exactly what I had expected, there were several more explosions than I had pictured (between food grade hoses, tractor tires, and tractor engines it was quite a few mind you), and I never really pictured myself drinking Calvados at 7 a.m. with a team of transient Bulgarian grape harvesters. But after having survived through the process, it ...

Things have been running pretty smoothly here at Le Meslerie. Just finished a great push of harvesting and pressing more grapes, 950 liters yesterday (which is laughable by pnuematic press standards, but by hand it's pretty damn good). It's with a heavy heart that I realize that my time here in France is dwindling, but this also means that more adventure is to come, hopefully the good kind.

After ...

... an hour to get back to the hotel, at which point we had a wine tasting with one of the owners of the hotel, Laurent. Chinon produces both red and white wine, though 81% of the production is red. We tried three whites: a sparkling, a dry and a sweet. I liked the sparkling and the dry, but the sweet was really, really sweet. There was some goat cheese to try with the dry one. And we also had two reds, along with rillettes (a sort of paté made from pork shoulder and leg) and ...

... to walk a short ways from the coach to the Hôtel Diderot (www.hoteldiderot.com). It's a lovely building, with a couple of out-buildings, and an orange and white cat who ignored us, then showed off his white tummy, and then came over to us specifically in order to shed on all of us who were wearing black trousers. His name is Boobie. Seriously.

My room (#8) is bigger than the one in Paris, but smaller than last night's room. I have a shower stall with ...

I took a day trip into Tours, which is the biggest city around here. It's a pretty amazing places, I still have a lot of exploring to do here yet, but I wanted to post some pictures of my first trip that I took into Tour alone.

Enjoy

... Janice out of the shop and stared us down while we sat at the dessert restaurant. She wanted the product back. She was trying to get Janice's attention without yelling at her and calling her and the kids thieves. As I walked back to the restaurant, it dawned on me that maybe Sam had been wrongly accused this whole time. Maybe he was the victim not only of a wrongful accusation, but also a false identification initially by the shopkeeper. Maybe it was Ella who had ...