We were all worried that the sick person in the group would deteriorate, or at least not feel much better, but thankfully they did make something of a recovery; Not feeling brilliant, but at least able to do some of the stuff that we’d planned to do.
The other concern was that whatever they had would spread to other people in the group, and thankfully that didn’t happen either. I’m sure we could have quarantined the unwell and generally made the best of it, but it’s nice not to have had to.
The booked activity for the day was a tour of various châteaux (I think that’s how you pluralize that). Got picked up from a spot in town with a huge number of tourists hanging around, which initially had me worried about it being a coach trip or something, but it turns out that they run small van trips. A lot of them, so they had people there sorting the crowd into their different tours.
Our tour ended up being our group of five, Jade the tour guide, plus Kyle who was a pilot in Paris on layover who had taken the train to Bordeaux that morning, and was doing some tourist stuff between arriving in Bordeaux and being able to check into his hotel.
After the visit to the outside of a chateau (I think) there was a bit of wiggle room in the schedule, and so after the question of “do people like chocolate?”, we got an unexpected excursion to a chocolate shop. Actually a chocolate boutique, but to be fair almost everything in that area did seem to be a boutique of some kind.
Maybe it’s just the particular route we took but there didn’t seem to be any really large settlements it was all tiny little villages at best and hamlets more accurately with ’boutique’ stores and really not much else. I’m guessing that in this context ’boutique’ just means “we made it ourselves”. It did seem like it would be a very pleasant landscape to walk or perhaps cycle through, because it was mostly, flat there wasn’t a lot of traffic, and if at any point you felt tired or thirsty it didn’t seem like you were going to be that far away from one of these small villages with a small village bar or cafe in it.
The really unusual thing about chateau number two was a white merlot, in the bottle on the left in the gallery. It is a red wine, and it’s made from red wine grapes, they just filtered it through charcoal to make a colorless red wine.
Dinner, which I didn’t take any pictures of, turned out to be at an Italian place in a square in Bordeaux. Again, it took a while for us to find a suitable place, and I’m not sure why. To be fair, because I was having some spine problems, I was always at the back of the pack when we were moving and so couldn’t really be part of any discussions or planning because my walking pace really wasn’t that good; I’m assuming that there’s a reason why various places were passed by, and I just went with following the group.