Chartres to Tours

Perhaps the most interesting thing about today is how you pronounce the title to today’s post. Char-TRES to Tours is the American way. Not so here in France,  Try “shah truth” and “tour” and you will be understood. That is why when we travel and have to buy tickets at the train station I write write out the names of the towns that we are leaving from and going to. Between my very limited French and the SFNC ticket agents very limited English we always manage to get the right tickets. Linda claims I’ve just been lucky so far, but with this being our third multi-month trip to Europe and no problems yet, I’ll just keep pushing my luck until it runs out. Then Linda will be right and I will just ignore her. Meaning we will both havethe best of both worlds and I will be just as happy as Voltaire. (Candide was the first book I ever read in French. And that was decades and a continent ago.) Could that we once again relive our misspent youth.


This was to be another travel day, Chartres to Tours, both of which you now know how to pronounce. Hey, the only thing left for you to do is to buy your airline tickets and you can hit the ground in France a running. Speaking of hitting the ground a running, here we are, two days in a row with a real French breakfast. The only problem is that this is fast becoming a thing of the past as the French are starting to add cheese slices and meat slices to breakfast. France will never be the the same I tell you.


The great thing about reading this blog is that you don’t get the puffed up, glossy, shiny, this is the way the guide books and the Fodor’s and Rick Steves of the world want you to think travel is like. No sooner had we arrived in Tours than Linda was hard at work doing our laundry. Then it was my turn. We had a fan in the room but Linda couldn’t get it to work on anything other than low. Enter Mr. Fixit, and soon it was sending out a stream of high speed air certain to dry our clothes in no time. Notice that Linda made sure all our dainties were behind the fan in the above photo.

 We were hungry, so walked back to the train station, grabbed a couple of sandwiches from the counter and headed back to our hotel room. As always, Linda had to know exactly what she was getting while I ordered what looked good.

Here I must back back up to an intermediate stop on our journey in the town of Oleans, where we bought two sandwiches for lunch. Linda refuses to learn even the most simple French words, so when the girl behind the counter was trying to tell Linda what was in the sandwich she ordered, Linda somehow thought she was talking about sheep’s cheese when the girl was actually talking about ham.

In the end Linda ordered a goat cheese sandwich thinking it was something else, meaning I had to order a ham and Swiss cheese sandwich for Linda so she would have something she could eat. that meant I had to eat the goat cheese sandwich she had originally ordered, which I didn’t want, but such is life. I can’t understand why she won’t even try to learn to learn the simplest of French words, but I guess it is as the French put it,  “C'est la vie".


I don’t know what it is, but it is interesting to say the least. All I heard was “Go stand in front of it”, and that is what I did.


For some reason Linda found this to be the most interesting thing we ran into all day. He was doing his thing in the square of the old town, and Linda, boule de glace in hand, watched him for at least 15 minutes while I wandered around the old section of town taking photos, none of which are being posted, but all of which are very interesting.
TThis is a totally posed photo to show what our hotel room was like.  it was bigger than any hotel room we have had in France so far, and less than half the posted price for the rooms we stayed at during our Rick Steves with far more room.















This is the photo she would not allow me me to post, the one that shows the room as it was when we first got there. “Did you take a photo with all our stuff on that bed?” she said.

“Of course’” I said.

“You can’t post that on the Internet” she said.

That’s why I posted the the first photo. You can look at the second photo and see what Life is really like. Who needs Photoshop when you have Linda. I don’t know if this is a Bad Bob or not, but it sure is what travel in Europe is really like.