A gorgeous day in Tours.

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On the 2nd we slept in, and then set out in the direction of the market at around 10 am.

You know one of us is a serious foodie, and the other loves to take pics of food (as well as eat it.....).

You will understand that this is a beautiful and interesting city when I tell you we didn't actually arrive at the market until about 4:00 pm...........

:-)

We started with pastries -- a pain au chocolate for moi, and a chausson au pruneaux for the foodie (same sort of pastry as the pain au choc, but in a different shape, and with a prune filling, as prunes are a speciaty of the region). We at them sitting on a bench right by a bridge over the Loire..... The bridge had a lot of brightly-colored flags........

And I see that I forgot to mention that, weather-wise, it was another PERFECT day.

The pastries were ok. As always with pain au choc, the emphasis is on the pastry and not the choc. I would prefer something smaller, with a much higher ration of choc to pastry..... :-) We thought the same about the pruneaux.

We then wandered through the old part of town (many, many more half-timbered houses, some "secret" gardens, some ruins over 1500 years old....

We stopped in one square for a coffee (keeping my headaches away requires a regular supply of caffeine), and spent a bunch of time choosing postcards. We wandered around a bit more,and discovered it was lunch time. We knew were we were going to eat lunch, so we headed over there (opposited direction from the market, but not very far).

Lunch was fabulous ... about which, more later........

Then we headed back toward the market, with a detour through a church or two (one a new one -- built in the last 2 centuries -- interesting, with marble columns holding up a wooden roof (well, I'm sure the roof isn't wooden, but the roof-holdy-uppy-parts are......).

We bought three kinds of bread (one savory, one sweet, one "just" (!!!) bread.

When you have a truly excellent product, having little tastes out is very good marketing............. We liked every single one we tried, and it took us a long time to choose.......

We also got some of the local mirabelle plums, which are yellow with red on the peels, and which are tiny -- the size cherries. THey are very nice, and come off the pits very easily -- a big advantage if you want to cook with such tiny stone fruits. They were lovely. We also had a yellow bell pepper left over from the market at La Rochelle, and a cucumber from Carcassonne, which was getting a bit tired.

Then we came back to the hotel and spent hours triaging pics and catching up on our note-writing.

We headed out for yogurt to go with our bread and fruits and veggies, and I also got a couple of pairs of socks for 7E. We are really extravagant in the souvenir dept., as you can tell. :-) Postcard after post card, with a few much more expensive items like socks or a small paperback cookbook...... :-)

Tomorrow -- chateaux!



In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these posts, here is a link to the post that comes after this one.

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