Tours, France Day 1 - Azay le Ridau

10/22/2014

After getting up and dragging our luggage out onto the deck, we saw this:

Lots and lots of sheep being herded by a sheepdog across the road. I’ve never actually seen a sheepdog in action before, so this was really cool. Except the stink. As the sheep ambled across the road, they kept dropping their poop, so by the time they all left, the street was strewn with lots of piles of green dung. Cars had to stop on the road to let them pass, but as this is the countryside, no one honked as this is perfectly normal in their everyday lives.

We drove 2 hours along country backroads (to avoid tolls) to reach Laval, our midway point that we plotted out last night. There’s a ginormous E LeClerc here (actually, they’re all ginormous). We had a bathroom stop combined with some shopping and lunch, as Dad insisted on buying a pizza. It was pretty good—thin crust, tomato sauce, prosciutto and bacon, and a runny egg yolk tops the whole thing.

We drove 2 more hours to reach our hotel in Tours. Right when you enter the city, you know it’s a huge city, as the traffic is so congested here. There’s high rises when there aren’t any in all the other cities we drove by, and there’s a lot of people walking about. The City Hall is a huge building and it's absolutely gorgeous. I read online that the view at night is very pretty, but it's way too cold right now to venture out at night. I can barely stomach the daytime! And I thought Tours was supposed to be warmer than Normandy!

After dropping off our luggage, we drove another 40 minutes to Chateau d'Ussy...but as it turns out, the road the gps had us follow was blocked off due to construction work. We were tired, it was almost 5 pm (the chateaus' last admission is 5pm), so we turned back around and dropped by Chateau d'Azay le Ridau for some photo ops. 

This chateau is known for its famous winding staircase:

It's under reconstruction work and should be finished by 2017:

The village of Azay le Ridau:

Our dinner consisted of a red wine famed in the Tours region: Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil. This is supposed to be fruity red wine that tastes very good in its first year, so we bought a 2013 to try. But I think we were expecting a Napa red with the big explosion of fruity flavors, and the St. Nic is more dry, like a Bordeaux. The wine smelled very fragrant, with lots of berry notes.

Mom saw this at Leader Price and knew immediately she wanted to eat it for dinner:

Puff Pastry with cheese and ham inside...you can see the cheese oozing out. Yum!

We have a fully equipped kitchen in our hotel rooms, so it was nice to come back after a long day and just eat in. Mom baked the puff pastry pasty, I poured the wine:

So much cheese! Yum!

We had made a pit stop at the big Carrefour a 5 minutes' drive from our hotel, where Angel chose this dish for our dinner, something we also ate in our vacation rental the last time we were in Paris:

It's a delicious stew of lentils and pork cooked in duck fat (Carrefour brand). We bought peas to pair with the stew. Mom, Dad, and I kept going back for seconds, then thirds, and fourths. We first had this dish in Yountville (up near Napa) in a French bistro. The dish was $20-30 then, though of course it was topped with a piece of seared foie gras. Too bad French supermarkets don't stock this, so we can sear some ourselves ;( Well, we haven't found a supermarket that sells pieces of foie yet. Will keep on the lookout. ^.^