Friday 3rd September (delayed)

We awoke on the 2nd to another lovely day with the intent of leaving pretty early. So at about midday we fonally left the area near Amboise...

We left the Loire are to head south, well southish after Andy helpfully went the wrong way on a toll road (only addedanother 55k and 8 Euros or so... on towards St Emillion. We pulled over after a toll to get a snack at which point two plicemen on motorbikes pulled up behind us. Queue brown trowsers for us both! Chris panicked that her French really wasn't up to this but luckily they were going to the van behind us. We then left pretty quickly!

We decided to break the journey up with a one night stop on the way and Chris chose one she'd found the previous evning called L'Etang, a wee place run by a Dutch couple with the catch line "tres tranquil, confort" and how right that was too. The pitches were huge, all surrounsed by woodland and peaceful. Helped alot by the fact that there wer eonly two other pitches being used when we got there! We felt relaxed from the start and decided to eat there as it was far too hot to do any cooking :-) The food was fab and the Dutch owner only spoke English back to us even when we spoke French and the English waitress spoke French to us all the time (unless we needed help) which all in all led to a great evening, overlooking the lake.

We awoke next day to mist. Not what we expected! We picked up Andy's pain au chocolat and mulled over what to do. You see, we really liked it in the site and quite fancied a chill out day just relaxong but we needed sun for that. After breakfast we patched Chris's tyre (the original patch was fine, it looked like we pinched the tube when putting it back on) and then the sun broke through.

Decision made we diceded to stay for another night so Chris went for a run and Andy, er, looked after the van. He did that by sitting on the sand next to hte lake and reading a book. Tough work. So after lunch we sat by the lake and had a beer, lay by the lake, had a beer, well you get the picture.

After repatching the innner tube we had a great Italian style dish cooked by Chris with one of the wines we bought from the vineyard a couple of days previously and a proper relaxing day was done.
We currently intend to head south in the morning, though time will tell...