Bordeaux
Monday evening

Greetings from beautiful Bordeaux!  What an interesting city, fifth biggest in France, and second oldest seaport (second only to Marseilles).

We stayed Saturday night in a small caravan park, surrounded by old and prestigious vineyards near the tiny town of Lussac, then on Sunday visited St Emilion, which is old and interesting, but very much on the tourist trail.  Maybe only because it was Sunday (or maybe it's always the same) but there were loads of tour buses and crowds and very up-market wine stores and restaurants.  There was clearly a lot of money to be made looking after all those teeming hordes (of which we, of course were part, but not a lucrative part for the local industry).  We had a good look around and left for Bordeaux.

We had decided just that morning to stay in a hotel in central Bordeaux, rather than try to manage traveling through the suburbs by bike or public transport.  So we found a nice place (actually turned out to be a perfect place!) and set a course with the new Tomtom.  It was only when were well into the city centre that we had any difficulty.  Admittedly a few one-way roads have recently been changed around, but we managed well, up to a point.  A few times we were instructed to turn into a road, then found out that we couldn't, but we improvised a bit and got by.

There was one place that we kept returning to, with tomtom instructing us to go into a huge pedestrian zone, complete with huge barriers.  So we'd make a slightly different turn and tomtom would tell us to make a U-turn.  (By the way, have you ever noticed how often there's a police car immediately behind you when you have to make dodgy turns in a cumbersome vehicle in a strange city, whose signs are in a foreign language and where some of the streets are about 10cm wider than your car?  But they don't seem to care, or maybe they just sigh, look at our number-plate and dismiss us as English!)

Eventually, after driving down every tiny road and lane in the middle of Bordeaux, sometimes (I think) in the wrong direction, we pulled up (not properly parked or anything like that, although we would have if it had been possible) and phoned the hotel.  It was only then that we found that we DID have to enter the pedestrian zone, using an intercom at a barrier, giving them a four-digit code from the hotel and having the barrier magically sink into the road, out of the way!!  Would have been handy to know in advance!!!  Anyway, we made it and it has been WELL worth it.  Here's the van on Sunday afternoon on Cours de L'Intendance (the photo taken from our balcony).  Don't be fooled by the apparent spaciousness, outside this zone, the traffic is densely packed into narrow one-way streets and hardly moving!

 When we saw how lucky we'd been with our choice of hotel, we decided to stay two nights.  So today we've walked miles and seen heaps.  Tomorrow we'll leave (through week-day traffic!!) and head either NW or SE.

Regards to all from us.