Chad had told me to go to the Dordogne region so we headed off that way from Vannes, on the south side of Brittany. We ended up at a very nice chateau near Puisseguin, not far from the Dordogne River.
It's the middle of a hellish heatwave here in southern France. Today the car briefly said it was 112 out. So we have been limiting our outdoors activity. Yesterday we surveyed the local chateaux and decided that the best sounding one was the Chateau de Montaigne, which the 16th century philosopher had lived and had written his Essays. As instructed on the web site, we hustled over there so as not to be late for the 3pm tour. Alas, when we arrived we learned that the guide who was to have given us a tour of the Tower (where Montaigne lived and wrote) had fainted from the heat. So we did a self-tour of the castle, something normally forbidden on account of a bunch of relatively modern graffiti which appeared there sometime in the 80s.
By the end of yesterday, Mary was feeling poorly from all the heat and I had discovered the error of my ways -- that we had not in actual fact reached the Dordogne proper. So today, like the ugly Americans we are, we spent the whole time between our hotel check out in the Gironde and checking into our hotel in Bordeaux doing an air-conditioned blitzkrieg tour of the Dordogne. It's pretty there. I could see going back sometime.
Around mid-day we stopped into Perigeux for lunch and ended up in the Boulangerie of a Monoprix department store. I had felt the AC billowing out of there and knew that was the place to go. For a while we had to stand while these older white guys took up all the tables while staring at their phones. They were probably there for the AC too.
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