Vacation in Europe:
Chartres, Tours, Clermont-Ferrano
days 4 - 6
After leaving Marie and Francis in Rouen, we drove south to Tours. My husband had never seen the beautiful Chartres cathedral, so we stopped there on our way down. The cathedral is famous for its vivid blue stained glass windows and mismatched spires. We just missed a free organ concert, but it was lovely just to wander around the cathedral for an hour.In Tours, we found the hotel we had stayed in during our trip five years ago, Les Capucines Hôtel, then set out for dinner. We ate at one of the only open restaurants, Bar Arsène, which we were pleased to discover served the best crêpes either of us have ever eaten. We didn't visit any châteaux because we had already seen so many during our 1995 trip.
The next morning we set out to the east to go wine-tasting and just happened to stumble upon the Monmousseau winery. Monmousseau is the label of one of my favorite white wines, so it was quite a nice coincidence to run across their winery. We visited the caves and tasted lots of wine, then bought 3 bottles of champagne and two of wine for future picnics.
We had a lovely picnic next to the Cher river, then continued on to Clermont-Ferrand, where we were hoping to find out about some white-water rafting. It didn't work out, so we ended up deciding to do that later in the trip. We had a fairly nice dinner at a crowded restaurant, but the men seated right next to us were smoking some extremely foul-smelling cigarettes, and dinner was unfortunately not as pleasant as it might have been.
Far too much of the next day was spent driving to Switzerland.
Next stop: Geneva Vacation Index
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