Sunday & Monday 25 & 26 July 2010
A trip to the Loire valley to inspect a number of châteaux was the purpose of a two day trip, but as is the way of the adage of “the plans of mice and men” this did not happen in the manner that was intended.
I had booked a hotel that I believed was a small distance from the railway station, perhaps a kilometre or two. I had no doubt that a bus would be passing close by.
The first problem was that I could not find a bus timetable/route plan at the station – but that wasn’t really a problem, we will catch a taxi – so we did. I think that was the first mistake – I am certain that we took the very long scenic route that cost 15 euros ($22) and took about 10 minutes.
We checked into the hotel and were told that there were buses, but that they did not run on Sundays. Absolutely no buses operate on Sundays. None. Everybody except hotel, hospitality workers, police and hospitals has Sunday off – nobody works. Not even supermarkets.
This was a disappointment as I had planned to visit one or two châteaux that afternoon.
After we had found our room and taken our time to unpack and freshen up, we had a bit of a wander around the area and discovered that it had many hotels and industrial buildings – it turned out that this was the hotel area in Blois Nord (north). We found a cafe that had similar food to a McDonalds and managed to purchase a perfectly good coffee for the 3 of us. Interestingly, we saw a bus in the distance. We checked out the eateries in the area and then wandered off to find the bus stop that was close to the hotel, which turned out to be just around the corner. Again, another bus was seen, which was odd.
We eventually ate at a pizza restaurant and enjoyed our first French pizza. Like the Italians, this one used the thin base but used very different ingredients to the Italians. The flavour was lighter and very very good – they did not use much cheese at all, but used vegetables such as zucchini. Given that there were no shops open to purchase` bottles of wine, we had to make do with a couple of carafes of the house wine.
The next day we had a bit of a sleep in and made our way to the city centre on the bus at the grand cost of 1.10 euros each and despite the fact that the bus did take somewhat of a circular route, we all thought that the bus was only marginally slower than yesterdays taxi.
I found the tourist information centre and purchased the recommended package of 3 châteaux. I understood that the package included a transport by bus. Non monsieur, no bus with the tickets. I had read that we could catch a bus that just visited the châteaux. Non monsieur. You must catch the regional bus. You can only do one châteaux per day. It is impossible to do all three in one day. Given that we now only had the afternoon and could not do all three, there was no refund for the tickets we now could not use. Just a shrug of the shoulders. Bad luck.
Armed with the bus timetable, we wandered off and found the bus that took us out to Cheverny châteaux – by now it was around 12.30, the regional bus was just about to leave and the bus could not be caught back to Blois until 6.50. By now, I had the proverbial steam emanating from my head.
Nevertheless, we journeyed out there and spent some time wandering the grounds and eventually inspected the châteaux, and what an amazing building it was. Mind you, the housekeeping must be a real blast with over 50 rooms to keep clean.
After completing our inspection, we thought that perhaps we should check with the locals to confirm what we had been told about the bus timetables. I located the local tourist information centre and was told that another bus is due NOW. Sure enough, along the street trundles a bus and it is heading for Blois. However, I could see that this was not a regional bus, but a privately owned one.
We boarded the bus to discover that this was the bus that did a reasonably constant circuit of the châteaux. The driver gave us the timetable and we discovered that this bus left twice more after the last regional bus. And we could have seen 2 of the châteaux quite easily and maybe even the third. It turned out that the company believed that it was having a bit of a problem with the tourist centre in Blois. Gee, that wasn’t hard to work out. Maria the bus driver asked if we would lodge a complaint and I intend to on my return home. But even more disconcerting was that Maria assured us that buses do run on Sundays, even in the city itself – we could have seen all 3 châteaux over the two days.
I know that most travellers suffer being ripped off on occasions (taxis are a great example), but why somebody in a tourist centre would behave like this is incomprehensible to me.
It has certainly changed my view of France.
Maria said that their usual response to complaints was that the tourists did not listen to the information they were given. The woman at the information centre gave us the regional bus timetable, so there was no misunderstanding. The person at the hotel who told us that buses did not operate on Sundays was not seen again.
Today is Monday and shops are open so the obligatory bottles of wine for the evening are purchased, along with bread, cheese, pate and cold meats. All of this was consumed on the back lawn of the hotel, watching the sun set at around 9.30 and marvelling at the fact that dusk and twilight existed until around 10.30. I will not mention the fact that the sun rises at around 4.30 am.
Next we travel to Paris to stay overnight before heading to the Alps to stay with an old friend for the night, whilst Eily leaves us to travel to Milan and catch up with Murray at yet another basketball tournament.
Au revoir
