It was a very nice breakfast in a beautiful room overlooking the Loire. We enjoyed the croissants and other breads, jams, fruit, coffee and boiled eggs.
Suzy went for a brief walk out the back of the chateau to admire the view of the Loire. It was another very cold morning - just above freezing point.
Patrick helped us get our bags downstairs and into the car and we set off bound for Sarlat just before 10am. Last night, I'd looked up the route to Sarlat on Google maps and it had said we should take the A20 for most of the trip there.
The built-in satnav that came with the hire car guided us through various local and rural roads. I was getting nervous that it wasn't taking us in the right direction when we came to toll gates for the motorway.
My confidence evaporated when the route it wanted us to take was blocked and the only option we had was to take a motorway that headed due west rather than south. After about 20km on this motorway, it directed us off the motorway where we paid the toll.
The in-car satnav wanted to get us back on the same motorway in the opposite direction to which we has just come. I stopped in the carpark just beyond the toll gates so we could do some planning.
I found a large sign with a map of France that convinced me that we weren't going the right way. In fact we'd done a big sweep around the area we'd started from and hadn't got very far at all.
We pulled out our own TomTom to investigate how to get to the destination we wanted. The TomTom seemed to indicate that the A20 was closed for roadwork and so if we'd followed the in-car satnav we wouldn't have got anywhere.
So we decided to give up on the in-car satnav. Mind you, we couldn't find a way to turn it off and so it kept giving us bad advice until we found a mute button.
The TomTom took us through various local roads through farmlands, under farm sprinkler systems, along narrow village streets until it got us back onto the A20 motorway. From there, it was plain sailing on a high quality motorway that had a 130km/h speed limit for most of the way.
By this time, we'd wasted more than an hour because of the road closure and the poor advice from the in-car satnav. I guess we should have been using the TomTom all along. Perhaps the TomTom has more up-to-date information.
Along the A20, we contended with plenty of trucks and aggressive drivers in cars but it was an easier drive than yesterday when were leaving Paris. The scenery was better too.
The weather was very changeable - going from bright sunshine to clouds to showers. At one stage the rain turned into sleet. With the wind and our 130km/h speed, it seemed as though the sleet was attacking us - like machine gun fire hitting the car.
At about 1:30pm we stopped at one of the roadside stopovers for lunch. When we got out of the car, it felt even colder than when we'd left this morning.
At the end of the A20 we turned onto another motorway that headed west before going along a series of local roads that took us to our B&B in Sarlat.
When we knocked on the front door, it was eventually answered by a woman who had a shocked expression on her face. When we introduced ourselves, she said she had no booking from anyone today. She and her husband invited us in while they checked their records.
Suzy showed them an email trail that dated back to the original booking in June last year and the deposit that we'd paid for the room. Wendy and David were very embarrassed because it was the first time they'd made such a mistake in the eight years that they'd been running the B&B.
They said it wouldn't be a problem because all the rooms were free tonight. They would have to reallocate another guest who had booked our room on Saturday night.
We walked into the village to the Orange shop while they got our room ready.
The visit to the Orange shop was a hassle. They told us that the SIM we'd purchased at Paris airport couldn't be recharged and we'd have to buy a new SIM that could be recharged. We also bought a recharge top-up while we were there. She also put our address as being Sarlat rather than Sydney - she thought that part of the reason I couldn't update was because I didn't have a French address.
It took about half an hour to sort it out. No wonder I had so much trouble trying to do it this morning online.
The HR people at the Orange shop at Sarlat seem to have an interesting recruiting policy. They only seem to hire knowledgeable, enthusiastic, tall, slim, attractive, young, brunette females.
We took their advice and walked into town to have dinner at the Bistrot next to the cathedral in the ancient part of the town. Along the way we admired the cobblestone streets and old buildings before reaching the central plaza and the cathedral.
It was a very pleasant meal with a delightful wine from the Loire valley.
No comments:
Post a Comment