Amboise-Savonnieres-France-9-14-14

The route leading out of Amboise, according to the book, is well signed. Yet, we failed to find it and instead followed D751, the main Highway heading west. It was a fine route and there was not too much traffic on it and we stayed alongside the Loire and had a lovely day. It was much faster I’m sure than climbing into the hinterland and up the hills along the Euro Velo 6 route.

Amboise-Savonnieres-France-bike path

Tours was a bit of a dilemma. We arrived at the big city and there were signs showing the route out that went right through the middle of the city and out the other side. The problem was, we had to pick up Anne’s medicine at the post office. As always, it’s a dilemma to find specific buildings in a big city. Even though we had located the central post office on the Internet, finding it in real was a little bit more difficult. Tours has many pedestrian streets and winding narrow alleyways. We saw some magnificent buildings as we were searching for the post office.

Finally found the post office and went to get her package, but it was not there. Apparently, it’d never been delivered from Austria. This is so surprising to us that in the EU they haven’t got a postal system that works together between countries yet. We shipped Post Restante from Greece to Croatia and worked beautifully, but we couldn’t ship from Austria to France. The package seems to been lost in route and we will try to trace it and hopefully have it sent to us at the end of the route.

Tours has a lot of restaurants that are affordable so we stopped and had kebabs. There is a McDonald’s, a Subway and all the fancy quick restaurants that you see in America. But they were absolutely stuffed with French people because they were more affordable.

It took about an hour to cycle straight through the city and get out the other side. Then we got on a what they call the green route or a bicycle path that went through the countryside for a long ways. The bicycle path had its moments of rough pavement, but it was quite scenic riding through the forest and the countryside.

Savonniers is a charming little town right on the Loire. They had a small grocery store which opened at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and we were able to buy supplies and go to the campground which was less than a half a kilometer away. This campground was very nice because it had a real shelter where people could sit in case of rain. And believe it or not, we had another rainy night. They also had Internet.

Amboise-Savonnieres-France-Savonnieres campground