Euro Day 3 - Goodbye Paris hello Loire Valley

Today involved a trip that none of us had been looking forward to - we had to navigate the Paris subway with all our bags and three line changes. This meant having to cram into packed trains 3 times, and dragging our bags up and down long flights of stairs each time we changed platforms (too bad if you are physically handicapped or have a pram!). It was quite the athletic event!

Amazingly it went completely smoothly and all four of us arrived at Porte-De-St-Cloud on the same train.  Then Part 2 of our challenge arrived - finding where to pickup our lease car from, then actually driving it out of Paris. Our brand new Citreon Spacetourer has a GPS but it seems to be way worse than Google Maps so after it sent us on a 45 minute folly through Paris we turned it off and reverted to what we knew and trusted.

Anyways - once clear of the city we headed to the Forest of Fontainbleau which had some cool rock formations. It was tricky to find the parking spot, but once we did we had a late lunch (bagettes as usual) then we set off on a pretty short but fun walk.

It was good it was short because we didn't have much water (taps, toilets, signboards all an Australian luxury it seems!) so we were pretty hot and thristy by the time we returned to the car. 

We're now staying at the only campground I booked in advance - which cleverly has multiple swimming pools and some water slides.  It's in the Loire Valley and our plan tomorrow is to visit some castles then return to this campground.