Friday 11/14 or is that 14/11?

Breakfast of croissants, pains au chocolat, brioche, cafe au lait, preserves and orange juice. Mighty tasty. Provided by our hostess Odile at the Manoir-du-Parc, the B&B we stayed at. Good chow at some restaurant...I think it was French. Drove around Amboise and then headed off to take a tour of Chenonceau, a really really cool chateau. We did a 45 minute audio tour provided us by an iPod. This place was really big. We skipped the even bigger Chambord (400+ rooms) using the logic that once you have seen 399 room, you've seen 'em all.

From Chenonceau we took some really small roads, and I mean really really small, to a great town called Loches which happens to be the where Jeanne d'Arc heard the voices. Or Joan of Arc for all you non French speakers. I have heard Joan was hot...really hot! Actually, what the French inscription says is basically, Jeanne d'Arc was Joan's smarter sister who heard the voices, but told Joan that they were actually speaking to her, and that SHE should go to Reims and do all that crazy shit. Jeanne stayed behind, had the pick of the menz, and became an English teacher in a small high school. She was later known as Jeanne d'Berthoud. Joan got toasted.

Lunch in a Brasserie with beer (not Splugen) and wine. We found a perfect fixer upper for Terry to flip. The commute in the boat truck is a bit much, but the neighborhood is safer than most of the places in which he works.

Decided to skip through Clermont-Ferrand and went all the way to St. Etienne where we have holed up in a chain type hotel. Dinner is in our room with some wine, meats, fromage, wine, bread and wine. We bought these comestables in a number of shoppes in Loches. Very bohemian.

We took the big highway to St. Etienne. Speed limits are 130! I like to go really, really fast. Went through some mountains in the dark which was a bit stressful at times. It took us a while to figure out how to work the defroster so I navigated the twisties at 130km/h through a pin hole sized spot at the bottom of the windshield until the fog finally cleared. Excitement in the style of the French!

For any of you who are interested in this sort of thing: today's bottle of wine is a 2003 Chinon, Domaine de l'Abbaye at the staggering price of 4E,70 (=$6.11). In the nearly inimitable words of Adam Sandler, the abbaye is "not too shabby".

Safety tip for the financially squeamish. Toll roads are really expensive here. Today we spent 20E (=$26) for the privilege of drving really really fast. Good thing the wine is cheap.