Tours

Leaving the now sunny San Sebastian we are on our way to Tours in France, apparently a very popular place to venture out of to visit some famous chateau's, which is really just a fancy name for castle.

On the way through we had a brief stop in Bordeaux in drop off some of the busabout passengers who were staying a couple nights here, unfortunately for us we have to keep moving due our schedule. I say unfortunately because whilst getting a run down of the town from the busabout crew / tour guide we were made aware of a few great things Bordeaux has in store. Apparently every year there is something special called a macaroon off! From what we are told at this mini festival there are around 160 different types of macaroons brought in, tested and judged! Now I don't know about you but that sounds like a great job :D may be not for my belly though haha. They also have this mini tour you can do, a bus will take your roughly 2 hours out of town to visit a winery, now these areas of France have some great wineries I am told which are literally centuries old. I'm only guessing these folk know what they are doing haha. Apparently the reds here aren't as thick as you would find say like the shiraz's we get back home, these are pretty light and very fruity bordering on sweet. Out at this winery they show you the entire process of producing wine, you even get to jump in one of those big wine crushing buckets and get your feet into it, may be even start wrestling! I'm told that for lunch they serve a very very delicious meaty stew as well. Sounds like a bloody good outing if you ask me! In the town of Bordeaux there is also suppose to be a strip of shops varying in price range as you go along for 1.2km and we were told that they just about sell everything on this strip, elephant tusks included, haha no just a joke from our guide. Food wise there is a famous restaurant which serves only one thing, a big slab of meat with unlimited French fries, accompanied with good beer and quality wines! Now I don't know about you but hearing this makes me want to come back and see this place. May be I'll put it on the list of things to do next time!

Now we eventually arrived in Tours at around 4:30pm after catching this bus at 8am. Yes the buses are a great place to sift through photos, write emails, blogs and do a little research, that is only if the night before you took it easy to enable you to stay awake on the bus to do these things. Luckily for us this was one of those days and I got a bit written down, it is hard to keep up with everything when you are moving around so much, so much is happening and you forget to take notes here and there. I still have a Madrid blog to finish off but I figured I'd get this out the way well it is still fresh in my head. Right at this moment we are on a bus from Tours to Paris.

Tours is a small country town, you can easily get around it on foot and other than chateaux's all you really have left to do is go enjoy some of the local food and wine :D. I don't think we have sat down to a proper dinner since probably Valencia when we ate that delicious Paella. So craving a proper sit down meal we found a restaurant and made pigs of ourselves :p. For entre we both grabbed a beer and tried the snails, it came out served in a creamy garlic sauce stuffed into a profiterole case and it was delicious, I have tried snails before so I was more interested in whether Ross would like them and like them he did. We weren't too sure about the profiterole casing but the rest was spot on! For mains Ross grabbed the calamari and I grabbed a nice 350g steak with pepper steak, French fries and some salad for once, seriously havn't been getting many greens into us and we are craving it. I tried a nice red which the waiter recommended and true to our guides word, it was a very thin red but had a lot of fruity smells and was somewhat sweet. I told you I've been craving wines haha. For dessert we both had a crème brulee, it was enjoyable but it wasn't served warm like we have it back home, but may be this was just the that they do it at this restaurant. Feeling bloated after over indulging we headed for a our hotel to get some much needed rest.

Day two in Tours started out slow, we spent most of the morning on the net before heading off for our Chateaux Tour at 1:30pm. This tour took us along the river where we passed a couple less known chateaux's before making our way to the famous Chambord Chateaux. It was a massive castle, one which has had many many kings and princes through it's doors, renovating, restoring, improving and expanding the chateaux itself, the surrounding grounds, tracks through the hunting forests as well as a massive perimeter wall. I watched a video on the initial construction and development of the chateaux which was very interesting. My memory is terrible but something that stuck out was the fact that they do not know who the original architect was. In the centre of the building is a double helix staircase. Both staircases lead to the same floors but never meet, this was used for balls etc, allowing guests to make their grand entrance walking down the staircase looking at others on the opposite set of stairs. They think Leonardo Di Vinci designed most of the building, especially the double helix staircase. They are not 100% sure as he died before the construction, but they suspect, from sketches found of his work which are compared to certain sections of the building, that he had a great deal to do with it. By the sounds of it, Chambord was apparently not a very liveable Chateau, too large, too cold, has a mosquito problem etc. It is however the biggest of the region. Most of the time it was used as a meeting place for many hunting gatherings and still is I am led to believe. Throughout the castle there are lots of very detailed paintings, furniture, decorations, interior coverings, hunting trophies and antlers, hunting and military type equipment.

Chateaux number 2 was called Chateaux Cherverny, again a very nice looking castle, more antique furniture etc as it was a chateax which was actually lived in and still is. There are more hunting and military type equipment, knights armour, all the usual chateaux filled objects, haha if you have seen one you've seen them all :p no I am only joking, this one was a lot smaller and had a lot more of a homely feel, a bit over the top compared to your average house :p but nice never the less. On arrival there was a 'feeding of the dogs' show on, well not much of a show, they just stick a bunch of meat out and you watch about 50 hunter/pointer dogs compete for their 5pm meal! We were a little tired and ross was feeling a little under the weather due to the onset of conjunctivitis. We went and grabbed a nice healthy wholesome meal, Kebabs, haha well you joke now but at least there is lettuce and tomato in it which is a start :P. We then decided to venture into the old town to allow our bellys to digest. The old town was great, much more of an atmosphere around that area! Plenty of locals in bars, restaurants and clubs etc. We saw these great beer dispensers which were placed on tables designed to be shared, a fantastic idea :D. Unable to resist yet more sweets we walked past a glacier (ice cream store) and had one of those double take moments where I look at ross, ross looks at me and telepathically we communicate and somehow cannot walk any further without indulging in some more ice cream haha. It is so so damn good you can't help it, and we are on holiday, don't judge us and our lack of self control haha. From here we just took an easy walk home.

Day three in Tours, this will be our last day here. The bus will arrive at 4:30pm so we have a bit of time to kill. Ross woke up with a river weeping out of his eyes, poor guy was seriously struggling. Before breakfast we ventured out and found a doctors then walked to the pharmacy afterwards to collect the correct medication. A couple days earlier when his eyes started getting irritated he went to the pharmacy, where they did not speak English, and was given some eyedrops and tablets which were for allergies or was an anti-inflammatory. These eye drops somehow seemed to aggravate the situation and hence why he decided to head to the doctors. We grabbed some lunch and took a walk to buy some bloody delicious macaroons from a store we walked past the night before. We made our purchase and headed back to the hotel to soak up some free wifi and wait for out bus. The bus from Tours takes us straight up to Paris for the night.

As we are only there for one night and really just using it as a stop over to head to Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland the next day I won't do a Paris blog this time around, we will be back for a 5 night stop over after Oktoberfest!

The next month is going to be so so much fun, bungee jumping, sky diving, high ropes course, downhill mountain biking and possibly canyoning in Switzerland, then over to Alberto for a week and up to Munich for Oktoberfest!!!!!!! So excited haha, blogs are to come!

-Ryan