We’re coming to the end of our Spanish holiday, so today’s goal is simple: get to Tours in France. We take our time with breakfast, because lunch will be highway food, which is not often appetising.. It’s been raining the whole night and morning, fortunately our car is parked inside and we can pack up and leave around ten without getting a toe wet.
The route back to France takes us north along the coast, it’s only 20 to the border. We wave goodbye to cliffs, hills and sea and coast down into the plains of Gascogne. The ride is uneventful.. it continues to rain so the speed limit is 110 kmph, it’s surprisingly busy for a bank holiday, there’s a lot of pines, we see a rainbow twice. The most remarkable sight is a large set of identically styled cars and vans on the highway. The name of the company implies they’re into electricity infrastructure, so after some consideration we imagine these are driving to the northern coastline of France, where damage is expected tomorrow from storm Ciarán.
At one of the many highway service stations, we buy a chicken sandwich for lunch and eat it on the road. Fun fact: the toilets in the highway service stations are free of charge in France, whereas in Belgium and Germany you have to pay for the use of them. There, you get a voucher in return, but you can never use them up and so the car glove box gets littered with these vouchers, most of them overdue and thrown away during spring cleaning.
Music today is from Spotify: first we continue the list 90s Rock Anthems, then we play Dario G’s Sunmachine album. We arrive in Tours around four, we’re sleeping in a small castle just outside of town, in a eleven hectare park. The nicest thing here is that the forest floor is full of blooming cyclamen, making a thick tapestry of white and pink flowers. I wonder how long it took them to conquer the entire shaded area, but as I see a few huge cedars as well, I assume this park has been in the making for quite some time.
We have dinner in the hotel restaurant, cleverly built into the slope beneath the castle so that it’s hidden from view, yet has a wide vista over the valley below.
Febe writes 