Highlight The water garden

John and I walked into the middle of Blois to buy some shorts for him. We then went on to the Joan of Arc statue to get information for a cache, having been reminded the previous evening of her link with Blois. She had been blessed here in 1429 by the Archbishop of Reims before departing with her army to drive the English from Orléans.

We then returned to the apartment for the final pack up. We had said we would drive Katherine to the station and wait until her train left as she had to get to Paris to get her flight to Athens. She had all afternoon, but it seemed sensible.

When we arrived we were given keys for the apartment, the apartment block and a padlock that could be used to secure the tape for the parking area. We had never used more than the apartment key as Fabienne said that the other areas were never locked. We did an extra check of the apartment, then about 5 seconds after Katherine dropped the keys in the post-box, I found the parking tape was padlocked. We then considered our options. We wondered if someone in the block could let us out, or maybe we could contact Fabienne and see if she was free to come and rescue us. Failing that, we could help Katherine with her gear to the station by foot (it was a 10 minute walk and 8 minute drive) while we waited for the car to be freed.

Then we got lucky. A van arrived and needed to get in. The driver had a key and we noticed it took him some time to get it to work so clearly it was as unusual as Fabienne had said. We drove out and I had time to find a cache while we waited for Katherine to message that her train was on the move.

We had decided to overnight near Giverny to both see Monet’s garden and get Kath close to Paris. Blois proved a better option for her. We were told we could check in by noon and pulled in to a side of the road hotel to find the owner was doing renovations. We were a bit early (booking.com was wrong) and he was about to go out. However, he spoke good English, and our rather basic room was ready, so it was fine. We dropped bags, and on his advice, went to the tourist office in Verdon to get tickets, and drove to one of the free parking areas in Giverny.

We were trying to work out where we were going when the phone rang. Fabienne had heard from the local police that my wallet was handed in, minus the cash. We then had to make rapid plans, with the overall result that we sent Fabienne authorisation to collect the wallet and details of our last stay in France to send the wallet to.  She had offered to bring the wallet to us – but had misheard me and thought we were only 15 minutes away (instead of 4 hours!). If we had been that close, we would have returned to get it.

We should have been able to go straight in to Monet’s Gardens but we think there was a new person who directed us to another spot that was closed. So we re-joined the queue, until John did another check and saw other people with tickets go straight in after the token bag search.

We walked quickly through the flower garden, but spent most of our time in the water gardens. They were as we expected so lovely, and not quite as crowded as we feared. We did a walk through Monet’s house, as it was part of the ticket. It was full of reproductions of his work.

Back at the hotel I looked for restaurants in the area only to find the one with the best reviews was at the hotel itself. That made life easy especially when John found a channel for the World Cup. Our only issue was the lack of internet because of some issue the owner was having. His solution was to let us use a mobile hotspot from his phone and we were able to sort out all the messages we needed. The meal was delicious and on a par with the previous night, with a really light soufflé for dessert maybe giving it the edge for me.