Travel Travails

Following on from "round the world Wednesday / Thursday" and "Legoland Friday", it was only logical to round it nout with another 12 hours of continous travelling on Saturday.

We kicked off with a lovely breakfast at the Castle Hotel in Windsor (100m up the road from some other Castle in Windsor, which I presume was named after the hotel where we stayed).  That was followed by a stroll to Windsor train station to get the 8.57 to Slough (rhymes with `sow`, not 'enough').  Changing trains in Slough, we then alighted at Paddington to the news of considerable delays due to the unecessarily precise reason of a person having been 'cought under a train' earlier in the morning.  However, the underground got us to St Pancras (does not rhyme with Mark Le Cras, but neither is it pronounced like any part of the body that ,ight spring to mind), from whence the Eurostar, our fourth train for the day, deposited us at the Gare Du Nord, Paris.

I gather this station was named after a bloke called Gareth Nordic, assu,ing that my iPad autocorrect can be believed, and it is just a happy coincidence that his name, when translated into the local lingo, literally means "Station in the North".

All good to that point.  However, hiring a car in France is - in our experience - always a tricky proposition.  Driving a hire car here is borderline suicidal, but getting one in the first place can be just as hard.  Last time it was the unsubtle tactic of the depot just no longer being open on a Sunday.  This time it was a more complicated ruse.  The car itself was hidden in the parking equivalent of the metaphorical 'locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard"'.  Once locqted, we discovered that it had two superfluous seats in the back which made it hard to get our gear in - but despite them being removeable we were not allowed to remove them.  An hour and a hllf later following the offer, consideration and rejection of an alternate vehicle (for once, in that exact order), we hit the streets.

Using the co,bined geo-positioning and route planning capabilities of the iPhone, iPad and on-board satnav, we settled on a route that only involved one obviously illegal manoeuvre, but many others that would have been just cause for a major road rage incident in Australia.  Here they passed unremarked, and any prospective road rager would have had 2-5 more obvious candidates anyay.  Due mostly to Justine's superb driving, and partly to my astute navigational interpretations, we made it out alive...and without a bullet in our back.

We were a little surprised to see the GPS predict a 2.5 hour trip, but that was exactly what it was, getting us here at 8.15pm, but still with enough light to spend an hour wandering the streets to the getnle tones of a local-ish rock band (apparently on tour from Tours) thrashing out some French rock at a pub across the river.  The high point of the day was Lauren's seemingly endless one-liners as we drove down, which had us all in hysterics more than once and repeatedly broke up the odd tense moments.  I cqn't remember any specific ones, and they were all the sort of thing you had to be there for anyway, but cumulatively she was a cracker.

The town of St Aignan looks, qnd seems, to be just what we wanted.  Founded 1000 years ago around a castle that was already 200 years old at that time, it looks the classic Tour De France town with cobbled streets crammed with crazy multi-story buildings.  The whole thing is overlooked by an amazing Chateau, which we can see from the rear facing windows of our house.  The front windows look straight out at the River Cher, and on the other side of the stone bridge is a pub that has a quiet beer written all over it later on this afternoon.

After 3-4 very big days, the plan for today was a very quiet one.  Lauren was adamant that she was going to have a PJ-day, and even though I don't wear the, ,yself I was thinking of giving it a shot too.  As it turned out, we did get dressed, but only to allow multiple sorties to the Patisserie for baguettes, pain (bread) and the obligatory chocolqte croissants.  Topped off with an esspresso at the Cafe de la Poste, it was a fine fine start to the day.  The weather yesterday and today has been superb, the still blue days that set off the limestone colours of the town perfectly.  With the gentle evening breezes washing in the tall flywire-less windows, it is just superb.  A couple more days like this, and the 'renovators dream' for sale up the road might be starting to look pretty good!

Internet acces here is only via the terminal in the Maison du Tourisme, and it has a French keyboard, which means it has taken ,e ages to type this up!  Therefore, it might be a few days before I take on this challenge again.