"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.

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.

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.)