Day Eleven in France - Flat

Just in case I have not said this often enough, my wife is amazing and is our hero.



We left La Batellerie today, our hosts being helpful with our departure. My wife and I had a disagreement about which route we should take to Tours and our next destination but she won. She had hurt her foot yesterday so I did not want her to drive so we went through the French countryside. I had wanted to make for the motorway and return by the route that we had come by, but Google said that it would take longer. A problem with this was that the SatNav, on my now malfunctioning iPhone when we came, had the ETA wrong due to the villages that we would have to drive through.  But, the scenic route it was.  



When we were almost at the dual carriageway, we stopped for lunch, just before a diversion due to roadworks blocking our route.  After this excellent lunch, we took a different route than initially planned and ended up driving near to Châteauneuf, my wife not being allowed to stop though (which was good as it was the wrong one)!  Soon we were on the dual carriageway and then later the motorway but after stopping at a service station we developed a flat tyre.  That was fun. My wife, the French speaker, had to walk to the emergency phone while we waited to be picked up. Our breakdown cover did not allow them to collect us from the motorway and while waiting a motorway service vehicle but some bollards around us and the police stopped to see how we were doing. The kids coped well with this but did love seeing our car being pulled up onto the recovery vehicle once it arrived. They were not going to change the tyre on the hard shoulder and instead took us to a local garage.  Who spoke no English! Fortunately, my wife, finally managed to get through to someone in England who could speak French and a lady there allowed us to use the Google Translation service until a local lady came around who spoke English.  Our tyre was changed and a new one ordered for the morning (hopefully).




Then it was a journey through Tours trying to drive below 80Kph (50mph) which meant avoiding as many dual carriageways as possible and driving close to the Ibis where we had stayed on our journey south. We arrived at our destination, a B&B on the other side of Tours to find no one here and no way in!  A lady came around later to let us in and show us around. We were told (in French as she spoke no English) about a local place to eat which was very close by. With no internet access we walked only to find that they were fully booked and did not have the dinner reservation that my wife had been told had been made for us (my fantastic wife found is out as they spoke no English either).  We walked to a hotel that the local signs said had a restaurant to find it was closed and then walked back home, my son despondent that he might not be fed, and my wife, who had been through a lot, started to show the strains.  How we wished that we had stayed at the Ibis in Tours now!  Fortunately, when we got back, one of the families from the restaurant arrived at the B&B, which meant that we knew that a table was now free. We returned and they took pity on us and let us dine there.

And the food was worth the visit, so long as you like crepes. So now we are back and have a journey back to the garage in the morning, but it should be more direct, and if we are lucky, less stressful and if all goes well, our only issue should be not making the EuroTunnel train that we have booked to travel on.

And while the kids showed admirable resilience during what must have been a scary time for them and deserve heaps of praise, my wife deserves most for dealing with this and keeping things together when everything seemed to be going wrong.