Barely Making It Out of the Valley

It was our last morning in the Loire Valley. We enjoyed breakfast at our château (including some of that strawberry jam made personally by the swanky concierge). Then it was time to work our way back toward Paris, with stops along the way. The first of those was at Château de Chenonceau -- except then immediately, we turned back to the château where we'd stayed. We'd discovered the day's "travel misfortune" when we went to start taking photos: we were short one phone. (A quick "Find My" on the other confirmed that yes, it was still back at our hotel.)

Alright, circle back, grab the phone, then Château de Chenonceau. It juts out over the River Cher, and is known colloquially as the "ladies' castle," thanks to the influential women responsible for building and protecting it over the centuries.

 

As we toured the lovely interior, we were hyper aware of how loudly our sneakers were squeaking on the floors (though we weren't the only visitors with that issue). When we toured the beautiful exterior, we snapped many more pictures of the gardens and grounds.

...and another whimsical bit of English scrambled in with the French:

Next, we decided to visit one more winery on our way out of the valley. Caves Monmousseau was in some ways similar to Ambacia from the day before, a winery using a quarried-out cave system to age its product. But the scale was wildly different. This cave system was huge -- a sprawling space they could not possibly fill with wine. So they'd opted for another novel use for it: they'd invited an artist to come in and set up an exhibit inside. With old school overhead projectors and paintings carefully made on transparencies, beautiful images were actually projected into the halls and alcoves of the caves.

You could walk through it all, alternately taking in the art, information about the nearby castles that had been built with the stone from this place, videos about the making of their wine, and huge caches of the wine itself..

And it being early afternoon on a Monday, we had the place entirely to ourselves! We walked through what had to approach a mile of tunnels and didn't see a single other person. The wine we tasted at the end was also good -- but that hardly came as a surprise by this stage of the trip.

There were other famous castles in the area, but we decided that we'd probably seen enough "rich people's houses" for the trip. There were more wineries nearby too -- even some open on a Monday, a day that much of rural France closes entirely -- but we decided we'd had two winery experiences in two days that would be tough to match. The best thing would be just to get back to Paris, drop off the rental car, and have a slow-paced evening back in the city.

We just needed to fill up on gas again before taking the car in. And that's how we hit another "travel misfortune." Days earlier, when were leaving Avranches and were at our farthest point from Paris, we'd needed to refill the gas tank. The first gas station we visited had no person working there, and the pump didn't take any American credit card. We'd been a bit surprised... but everything had worked out easily enough; the second gas station we tried took a card at the pump and everything went fine.

Now, days later, we learned that we might have lucked into the one gas station in all of France that takes American credit cards. I was searching on my phone as my husband drove, looking for a gas station that was specifically not the chain that wouldn't take our cards a few days earlier. This is when I discovered that automated pumps in France rarely will -- a difference in how the PIN is encoded onto the card causes the pumps to reject the card outright. It's a problem you can encounter in several European countries, and the main workarounds seem to be: 1) pay cash, which we didn't have; or 2) go directly to an attendant who can process a pre-payment, though one is rarely on duty.

We tried a Shell station. A familiar brand available in America, so that'll work, right? Wrong. So then we just did the math... we should have a little less than 100 kilometers' distance left in the tank when we rolled into Paris. It would be cutting things closer than we'd like, but let's just drop it off empty. As we watched the fuel gauge, thought about the extra stops we fortunately did not make, and lamented a wrong turn at one point... we were right at the edge of sweating it a little. But we made it back. At least this didn't happen to us when we were nearly out of gas days earlier. (And at least the rental car agency's price for gas really wasn't any more than we were trying to pay outside the city.)

So finally, that relaxing evening back in Paris that we'd been hoping for. We wandered and did a little shopping. We got dinner at a cafe restaurant with a varied collection of absinthe, and they served us some with the full production: a sugar cube over the glass, and a slow water drip dissolving that into the spirit. It was a lovely evening... but not our final evening in France. We'd scheduled the trip to put one more full day back in Paris before we returned home. That'll be next up, in my final blog about the trip.