Well after receiving the email from the Hilton Garden Hotel in Tours which puts us in a bit of a tizzy we then had t decide what we should do. There were a number of choices as follows.
1- Go to Tours early and hope we can get in the car park as with many thousands of people arriving to see the race this could be risky, whilst the town will be packed and restaurants full.
2- Forget Tours totally and go somewhere else instead – but where
3- Cut our losses and reorganise everything and go straight home with one overnight stop but that entails cancelling Hotels and ferry booking etc.
So after review the map for while and looking at other potential towns like Blois, Chateauroux etc Noel in a rare mad moment remembered on the way down seeing signs for Beaville sur sarthe which reminded him of a visit we paid many years ago with the kids where we rented a boat on the river and Joanne brought here best friend Pippa. Also that was the time we had a dressing up fun night and the ‘The Parrott Club’ was born.
So after emailing Hilton as was concerned that by cancelling I would lose my points and which were worth over £ 250.00 and the auto reply came back saying we always answer within 7-10 days, Oh Hell but there's not much we can do but hope and about one hour later after cancelling the Hilton I received a reply saying don't worry Hotel is cancelled and we have refunded your points, magic!!! So now to find nice Hotel where we can stay for two nights which would allow the Rouen and Ferry bookings to stay as they were. So after somewhile following the river up and down looking at Hotel we cam across one called Grand Hotel de Solesmes which seemed to fit the bill in Solesmes which is close to Sable sur Sarthe and so we booked their for two nights. We also noticed that there are boat trips on the river and so we have also booked a boat trip for Sunday afternoon although we expect it to be raining.
So with that finalised we spent an hour by the indoor pool as Noel seems finally to overcome some health issues and then for dinner we had a large packet of bacon (unsliced) which Jennifer sliced up an to meaty size slices and fried on a bed of rice, really excellent.
An evening of TV followed with a mixture of you tube stuff and Netflix documentary on the music producer Phil Spector who committed murder and then played the system for five years before finally being found guilty and sent to jail.
