"tim....." writes:

"Doug Anderson" wrote in message
...
"tim....." writes:

18 months ago I asked for some help with visiting the Châteaux de
la Loire.

and I got advice about a dozen or so that I should visit.

I had intended on going immediately after I posted, but my plans
changed and I actually stopped off during a drive through to Spain to
visit a friend in October, giving me 4 days in the valley, based upon
staying in a hotel in Blois - when it p*ssed down every day :-(

As the number that you guys had indicated pretty much matched the
lists in guide books I though that this would be long enough to visit
them all.

But no, I hadn't done my research properly and when I got there I
picked up the leaflet from this web site
http://www.leschateauxdelaloire.org/ and there are 71 of them listed
(though not all are chateau) plus at least another 10 not subscribing
to that site.

So, I've just come back from a two week trip where I pretty much
blitzed the valley from one end to the other, though I still missed
out a few that don't open in June (or May, or September), or were
closed on the day(s) that I was in that specific area, so I still need
at least another week to finish them all :-).

Thanks for all you help guys.

I don't want to post a report as it will be pretty repetitive but if
the interested people are still here and want to have a discussion, we
can go that way.

But what I will say is that this trip didn't change my views on French
restaurants (in the region), the a-la-carte menus are flipping
expensive (basically you don't see any change from 50 Euro) and I
still couldn't find any menu de jour available in the evenings, though
one or two hotels did have buffet style offerings that were reasonably
priced, but that was too samey to have every day, so fast food it was
most days. So much for the home of Haute Cuisine!

Yikes. I have to say my experience of the same region is completely
different. But maybe I'm looking for something different than you.

It has been easy for me to find small pleasant restaurants with
decent prix fixe dinner menus at a sensible price.

Available in the evening?

Yes.

Or were they in the middle of nowhere?

Small pleasant restaurants with decent prixe fixe dinner menus are not
rare. One finds them in virtually any reasonably sized town, and
often in very small places too in tourist areas.

It seem unaccountable to me that you couldn't find such places.

I think you mentioned Blois. I type a search into tripadvisor and I
get 100 restaurants. I clicked on the third one as I have a vague
memory of eating there (but it may have been another restaurant in
another city with the same name) many years ago.

They have a website, which shows a prixe fixe menu at 16 Euros. Open
for dinner 7-11. http://aucoindtable.com/crbst_1.html. There seems
to be a large selecction of restaurants on the north bank of the river
near Pont Jacques Gabriel.

You could really never find such places?

In my experience there is nothing especially restaurant friendly about
Blois, and one can find a similar density of similar places in most
cities and towns.

Either I don't understand what you are looking for, or you are looking
in some strange non-tourist friendly parts of cities, or I don't know
what.

I did see one or two
restaurants in small villages offering the MdJ all day, but as I need
to walk to a restaurant for an evening meal (I'll leave it as an
exercise for the reader as to why) they were of no use


I will also point out that haute cuisine is not something the french
necessarily eat every single night! The fact that some of the
pinnacles of French cooking include complex elaborate meals does not
mean that _every_ meal is like that - after all, if anyone ate that
way at every meal, they would be obese.

I wasn't really using the term in its true technical sense ;-)

There is a point I agree with you about. Restaurants in a region tend
to serve food of the region, and thus one finds that menus are often
similar from restaurant to restaurant. (But if you are happy to eat
in fast food restaurants, one would think that this detail shouldn't
bother you so much.)

Actually it does. If I'm only paying 6 Euro for a take away, I'll
have the same each day. If I sitting down for a "proper" meal I
expect to get something different each day

You can call that strange if you like, but that's how I am

I'm the opposite. I tire of fast food very quickly, but something
presented well with good ingredients I can eat several times in a
short period, enjoying the small difference from place to place..