Bonjour,

We are at what might be called the beginning of the end of this journey. Now we begin to figure out where we want to be in the last days of the journey. If we wish to be in Amsterdam by October 7, and to return to our stationary home on October 14, what places do we want to visit in the interim? The end is definitely approaching.

We met an Australian couple whose activities are interesting. They were in one of the French campgrounds. Jane and Ted have a different travel and camping routine. They travel by bicycle, with saddlebag packs on each bike. Their sleeping quarters is a pup-tent. We asked about the day-to-day pattern. Ted said that they average about 18 miles an hour when riding, but only plan to travel between 50 and 60 miles a day. That way they get to make stops, buy food, and rest. If the city they wish to visit is more than 60 miles distant, they stop at a campground for the night and go on in the morning. If they have reached the city they wish to visit, they spend a day or two touring the city before they leave. Jane cooks in a single burner camp stove that they carry with them. They made us acutely aware of the comparative luxuriousness of our mode of travel. They also made us acutely aware of our comparative inadequacy. If they sound like a couple of youngsters to you, don’t hold on to that image too long. Ted, like us, has been retired for a long time. And their children are adults, as are ours. But we could not even begin to travel their way, and although we have a lot of respect for their stamina, we wouldn’t want to travel like that!

Anyway, we exchanged email addresses, wished them well and headed north. Into a dreadful downpour that lasted most of the day. We could not help but think of Ted and Jane slogging through their soggy miles that day.

We decided to revisit the Loire Valley. We missed a lot last time we were here because we were so anxious to get south in the early and cold spring season. Now we have a chance to see what we missed.

One of the places that we had missed in 2002 was Amboise in the Loire valley east of Tours. That was a big mistake. When we got here this trip, we loved it. First of all, it is beautiful. Our guidebook refers to it as a "renaissance town", that is, later than medieval. Its "Chateau" is a huge, beautiful royal castle on the river, surrounded by other buildings of great beauty and age. (Picture 1 shows the actual royal castle, which is only a part of the entire complex of buildings and walls.)

Somehow this town has managed to accommodate a very large number of tourists without being a tourist trap. That would be enough to love Amboise, but there was so much more. There are flower beds everywhere, and they are all in bloom. People are very nice. The Sunday marche (open-air market) was absolutely great. Added to all this, a very short distance from the royal castle on the river is a chateau which a French king (Francois I) bought and gave to Leonardo de Vinci. Leonardo spent the last three years of his life here. The town bought the chateau from its modern owners and turned it into a very interesting museum.

The Clos Luce (pronounced Klow Loosay), the Da Vinci chateau, is furnished in the style that was current in Leonardo’s time, which in itself is interesting. The downstairs rooms feature a superb collection of models of machines that "The Master" drew in his lifetime. None of these things were actually produced then. These were just theoretical drawings. The task of creating actual models was given to IBM. Everything was built to Leonardo’s specifications. They included several types of cannon, a tank, an airplane of sorts, a parachute, a helicopter roto, paddle-wheel boats, a drawbridge, military bridges, a bicycle, a self-propelled car, ball bearings, transmission gears, a pile driver and more. Many of the actual designs have been "invented" over the past 400 or 500 years. For example, armies still use Da Vinci’s design for a temporary bridge. And his way of building a bridge that swings to the side to open has been around for a hundred years. Of course, modern versions are made of different materials in slightly different shapes, but these things really work. (Picture 2 shows the wooden model of a bicycle, complete with a sprocket and chain drive.)

But we get ahead of ourselves. We came in on Saturday and found the campground. The town built a wonderful campground on an island in the middle of the river. It is easy to get to, beautiful, has good facilities, and is inexpensive—11 Euros a night, including 10 amps of electricity which is enough to run everything we have. As we checked in, we were told that there would be a marche the next morning, and of course, we decided that the outdoor market would be our first stop. Everything else could wait. So we walked across the bridge on Sunday morning and found the market not too far away alongside the river. We didn’t miss a single stall. There was fresh fruit and vegetables; bread and pastry; roasted chicken, duck and turkey; huge wok-like pans of paella; crepes; wine of the region; clothes; flowers and plants; cheese of the region; processed meats; fabrics and linens; twenty kinds of olives; candy; and fish. (Picture 3 shows the four pans of paella cooking for sale. What it doesn’t show is the huge line of people waiting to buy!) This does not exhaust the list of what was available. In fact, although we came knowing that we didn’t really need anything, we bought a lot. Adelle’s favorite purchase was a piece of oilcloth printed with a traditional Provencal print of wheat and olives which now graces our RV’s little table.

We naturally spent the entire morning at the market. We walked back across the river and ate lunch in the RV, and then went off to visit Leonardo’s Museum. It turned out to be a 2 mile walk from the center of town. Neither of us felt like doing that, so after walking for a while and taking pictures of the beautiful and ancient houses along the way, we turned back. Turned out that there was a little tram that ran up that hill, so we climbed on board and set out. When we got there, we found a huge line. The driver of the tram said it would be about a two-hour wait – and we don’t do that kind of line. We simply continued the tour. We are lucky. Unlike those visitors who needed to return to work on Monday, we could come back.

We had another great experience very early Sunday morning. There was a funny noise outside. It turned out to be the torch that heated the air in a large balloon. We’d hear a whoosh when the fire got high, then it would die down and there would be another rush of heat and air in a few minutes. The people in the basket waved as they floated by, suspended under a balloon made of different colored cloth segments. On Sunday evening, we heard the sound again and when we looked out, the same balloon was getting ready to take off from a field only a few feet away from the campground. We had the privilege of seeing it in the air twice! (Picture 4 shows the balloon catching the rising sun as it drifted directly overhead of our Dolphin.)

On Monday we drove out of the campground and found a parking space in a lot set aside for "camping cars". It looked on our little map as if it was right near La Clos Luce. It turned out to be half to three-quarters of a mile uphill to get to the museum! We got there, but we were already tired. After going through the house and seeing the models, we went out to the garden where the museum had created a very long path with audio information as well as full-size models of some of the machines. That half-mile path went right back to the road we were parked on – but there was no exit there. So we walked another half mile or so back to the entrance and then returned to the car. The return trip downhill was much easier.

After the museum, we decided to take care of errands and not do too much more walking. We knew where we could park along the river and did so. Then we walked the half block to a laundromat – and another three blocks to the internet café. By the time all this was finished, we had spent an entire day in Amboise, and we now headed back to the campground.

As we pulled up to the campground barrier, a police car drove up next to us. Two members of the French Gendarmerie (a national service) motioned us to pull over. We knew at once what the problem was. The law in France is that you must have two license plates on your car, one on the front bumper and one on the back bumper. They could see none. That is because we put the only real plate that the state of Florida gives us high up inside of the RV’s rear window, facing out, held there by two-sided tape. It is not on the bumper. We had been told that a U.S. plate is a terrific souvenir – and if anyone stole it, we couldn’t replace it. So we keep it safe inside. A paper copy of the plate is in the RV front windshield. Try saying all that in primitive French to two people who don’t understand a word of English.

Before things got too bad, another police car pulled up. One of these policemen spoke English. Were we ever glad to see him! We explained our predicament, and he translated to the other three. Ultimately they understood completely and agreed that we could be forgiven. They told us that we might have the same trouble again from another set of Gendarmes who happened to notice us. We always had anticipated this sort of stop. Indeed, now we have traveled on the Continent for nearly six months and in the UK for nearly three additional months and this was only the second time we were stopped because of where we show our plate. The first time was in 2002 near Lascaux, not far from here.

After everything was settled, the young man who spoke English asked us if we liked Amboise. Adelle answered by saying that we loved it and that we had discussed the day before what a privilege it is to live in a place like this. It is beautiful, historic, and friendly. (Incidentally, it is not just friendly in face-to-face interactions, but tourist-friendly as shown by the large number of signs, easy access to parking and all kinds of institutional helpfulness.) He agreed that it was a privilege, the Gendarmes left, and we continued into the campground.

There was comment of course. Not only from other campers who asked what had happened, but from the man in the reception office who also inquired.

We stayed another day in the campground. There were several other chateaus in the area that we would have liked to see. We should explain that we have decided that we have seen quite enough fancy furniture and palace décor. It is just not something that we want to concentrate on. We like to look at the architecture of these buildings and their grounds – but we don’t really want to see the inside unless there is something special about them.

We drove to a chateau called Chenencaux, but decided to by-pass it when we discovered that the only way we could see the building, even from the outside, was to pay a hefty entrance fee. The fee wasn’t out of line. It included a tour of the rooms, the grounds, and an art gallery – but we had no intention of doing any of that. We had hoped we could just see the outside but the chateau was so far from the box office that we couldn’t even do that. We just drove back to the campground, using a different road and seeing several little villages in the process.

The next morning we left Amboise for Chartres, to see the Cathedral again. We tried when we got to Chartres to find a parking lot, but ran into the usual problem with inner cities designed many centuries ago. We found ourselves going around narrower and narrower roads with no clear way to get out. Took us a while, but we finally managed to extricate ourselves, and eventually we found the road that led to the campground. There was no bus to center city from the campground so we decided to wait until the next morning when we could use the map the campground gave us to find parking spaces on the perimeter of the city. Then we had a really good idea, and asked whether there might be bus service from the commercial center outside center city where there was a huge supermarket. Of course there was, so we drove to the supermarket parking lot, parked there, and took the bus in to see the Cathedral. We are not reluctant to leave the RV alone in some places and the middle of France is one of them.

Chartres Cathedral is enormous and beautiful, of course, but its main attractions are its stained glass windows. It is hard to believe but they date from the 13th and 14th century. Somehow they survived until the 20th century. They were removed and stored during both world wars. Many of the scenes in the windows are of bible stories because that was one way to provide instruction for the congregation. The money that paid for the windows came not only from kings and nobles but also from guilds of merchants (butchers, coopers, bakers, etc.), and they wanted recognition. So the windows are not only beautiful, but they provide a good picture of life in those days. Some show people at work, others may be of a nobleman in his fine clothes. All of them are very brilliantly colored and even though they are so high up that it is hard to see the pictures clearly, they are beautiful. Pictures 5 and 6 show the outside of the Cathedral and just one of its rose windows with other panels of stained glass underneath.)

When we returned to the RV, we did our usual. We went shopping. We knew that we were headed for Paris where it is not so easy to get to the supermarket, and we wanted to be prepared. Besides, we’ve never seen a French supermarket that is uninteresting! If we started after lunch we should be in Paris before the rush hour. And we were.

In fact, we write this from the campground in the Bois de Boulogne, on the bank of the Seine, from which one can see the Eiffel Tower.

So, au revoir a tout le monde.

Adelle & Ron

Authors of "Take Your RV to Europe, The Low-Cost Route to Long-Term Touring"

For more about the Milavsky's adventures, go to:

http://travelwithachallenge.com/RV-Vacations-Europe.htm

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