About two days again we were driving on the A63 and we had an incident.  For those of you that don’t know the A roads are the freeways and the fastest way to get anywhere but it costs to be on them.  About every half hour or so you have to go through a peage and pay to be on the road.  It cost about 20 Euros to get from Mortemard to St. Jean de Luz.  We pulled into one peage and there was nowhere to put in money and you had to use a credit card.  Lola got her card out first and Susan fed it into the machine.  The machine spit it out.  Susan tried several more times.  Meanwhile a line is forming behind us.  We can’t back up.  Lola grabs another credit card and Susan tries again and nothing happens.  Susan motioned to the cars behind us to let us back up and we slowly started backing up.  Then the lady right behind us got out of her car and came up to help us.  She tried our credit cards and still nothing happen.  She pushed a button (who knew) and spoke to someone about the paege not working.  Voila’!  Two young girls apeared and we paid 1.80 Euros and after several exciting minutes the gate when up.

It has been a couple of days since I have been on the blog because our hotel had WI FI but after I entered the security code of about 20 numbers and letters it wouldn’t work.  I am currently in a Best Western in St. Jean – de-Luz and their WI FI works so, here we go.  We left Chinon and said goodbye to a very lovely girl, Karin, who worked at our hotel: Hotel du France.  Karin was very, very kind and helpful to us.  Thank you Karin!  We headed toward Limoge.

We stopped to have lunch in a tiny village and it was fabulous.  Who would think a tiny village store that sold clothes, groceries, meat and cheese would also fix a fabulous meal?  Lola called her friend John and he took her off to visit and Barbara, Susan and I headed for our next site.   

We stopped to visit Oradour-Sur-Glane which is a village where on June 10, 1944 the Nazis murdered 643 people, 193 were children.  The entire town was destroyed.  It was a haunting thing to see.

After visiting this village we headed toward Mortemart to buy gas and then we began the search for a hotel Rick Steves recommended.  We found it but it was closed.  We found another Bed and Breakfast but it had 28 stairs and the man said he couldn’t carry our big heavy bags and recommended the hotel we had just tried.  We called the number on the hotel door and the lady said she would be right there.  We saw the rooms and got three rooms.  It was called Hotel Le Relais.  We called Lola and told her where we were and she got there in time for dinner.  Dinner was incredible delicious.  In Rick Steves book he said the lady who operated the hotel was very helpful but didn’t speak a lot of English.  When I couldn’t get on the Internet she called her daughter in Atlanta, Georgia to see what was wrong.  Susan told her daughter that nothing was wrong we just couldn’t get on the Internet.  Now, that is helpful.

Today it rained but we are fearless travelers so off we went to see the castles.  We visited Usse Chateau.  Susan and I paid 14 Euros to go inside and see the interior.  You couldn’t take flash photos but I got one of the dining room.  The gardens outside were designed by Le Notre, the famous architect of the Gardens of Versailles.  Susan climbed to the top of the Sleeping Beauty tower.  Then we left and drove to Amboise and had a coffee and pastries.  Te chateau at Amboise was beautiful also.  We saw more chateaus along the road.  Tomorrow we are heading south for Limoges.