Another Day in Tours

“When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman


While our original plans had been to spend one of our days in Tours taking a day trip to Amboise, we decided, with some vigorous input from Linda, that having spent a brief time in Amboise during our Rick Steves Tour, and knowing that there is a whole lot of up and down to visiting it, we would just spend our time in the very flat city of Tours.

As you can see, just because we weren’t going to be doing any walking up and down hills today, Linda still needed a good meal to get her going. A very tasty sweet bread slathered with Nutella was all she needed. Besides that huge cup of coffee that is. There was so much lips smacking going on that I had a hard time keeping from laughing. And I was told that, yes it was that good, but it was all hers.


This was our daily: what is it? Since we were in the courtyard of a wine museum that unfortunately is only open on weekends, we decided it had something to do with wine making. Huge stone blocks with grooves, channels and slots cut into them sure got Linda’s attention. Meanwhile I found an interpretive panel that explained everything about where we were except what those stones were. It was looking like one of those days.


Wandering around the back streets on the old town area we found some really neat buildings. This one has at least four and maybe five different centuries showing in its façade. I did find a website that describes many of these old buildings, but of course it is all in French, and it was more for the people who are into these things as it was loaded with all kinds of abbreviations that baffled Google Translate. Sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t.


Lunch, a great meal in a itty bitty little Creperie. Linda went with a glass of kir and a mushroom in cream sauce crepe. I had a pichet of cidre along with a Breton sausage and cheese crepe. If you go back far enough, sausage wasn’t anything like our mushy ham and tenderloin sausage of today. No, it was using everything that was left over after the all the good cuts had been used. This was definitely the old style sausage, and once I got beyond the “chewiness” of it, ignoring what those parts looked like, it really did taste great. I may or may not ever have it again, but I’ve had it once. And that is what travel is all about.


Just like crepes, why go for the tried and true in scooters when you can have something different. And with that I will sign off, having attained my goal for the day of getting caught up on these posts.