All you do is wine...

Mel's a bit of a regal history buff, so the chance to go to Fontevraud wasn't to be turned down. A favourite of the Plantagenets, the abbey in the small village contains the tombs of Eleanor of Aquitane, her husband Henry II of England, and her son Richard the Lionheart (who barely set foot in England after succeeding his father). Henry was a lesson in testosterone fueled machismo. Having found himself fighting against his sons (and Eleanor), all of whom had sided with the French king Louis VII (to whom Eleanor was once married), he was forced into a sort of truce which saw him giving up a great deal of his lands. Suffering horrifically from anal abcesses (this is not a pleasant tale) he refused to dismount from his horse, whispered in Richard's ear that he hoped to live long enough to take revenge, then was promptly carried off to some nearby castle where he died not long afterwards.

The Abbey itself was a fantastic building, and to be in the (dead) presence of arguably three of the most important characters in English history was interesting. But the constant sun saw us seeking out refreshment and when in France that obviously means wine. I was under strict instructions from Mel that we are to take home a number of cases of wine (which given I've declared October after the holiday to be a dry month for me is going to make things... intriguing), and with a choice of appellations we headed to Saumur, and more specifically Bouvet-Ladubay (apparently one of the best producers of Cremant de Loire in the country - a sparkling white made in exactly the same way as Champagne, but because it's not made specifically there cannot be called that). This whole area is dotted with huge deposits of 'tufa', a sort of limestone. And for centuries now the people of the region have mined the tufa for buildings, and then used the holes they dug for all sorts of purposes. And storing wine was an obvious choice, with the temperature in the caves remaining at around a constant 14 degrees no matter what the weather is doing outside.

The tour through the alcohol-laden grottos ended with two cases of of wine being bought - one Cremant de Loire, and one Saumur Brut. Yep, October really is going to be hard.

Not content with all of that filling the day we then made for Chinon, and another chateau. With works going on to restore and renovate certain areas the trip was curtailed slightly, but then so was the entry fee so you didn't feel too hard done by. What we did get to see was once again impressive on a grand scale - though something is becoming clear with all of these places we're visiting. The exteriors are immense and grand and extravagant. The interiors are just lacking something. Either they are half empty, or they've not even bothered trying to display the rooms in the way in which they would have been - some serve as odd little museums to things (the clock tower at Chinon is filled with stuff about Joan of Arc, but it's things like clay models a local school made about the story and photos of a silent movie actress playing her...) and others display rooms in the '19th century style' and the like, wen the location's main claim to fame is as a 15th or 16th century battlement.

Anyway, we headed back to the cottage via Ussé, which apparently inspired the Sleeping Beauty tale. It's definitely a fairytale looking castle. But with a ?13 entry fee we were wondering about the merits (the guidebook warned of slightly odd mannequin displays on the Sleeping Beauty theme) and our fears were confirmed with a chat to a Dutch tourist who was back in the Loire after first visiting 39 years ago and was having trouble with the memory card in his camera (which I managed to sort for him).

Oh, and French road signs are rubbish. Or rather the consistency is. Keep following the signs to some place or other and you can almost guarantee that at some junction or roundabout which is crucial to your continued travels towards your destination, that the name of that endpoint will disappear. Just for one of them mind, but enough to keep you on your toes, relying on intuition and good map-reading skills to make sure you don't wind up back at Calais (I'm convinced this is actually a ploy to get all the Brits to inadvertently drive back out of the country).