France by train.....

Enroute to the South of France by train.....

I always get the pictures backwards, but oh well. From Paris, we took the train to Orleans. We had time to walk the downtown part and enjoy the city. We found the Brice store a couple doors down from our hotel. Brice, I'll bet you didn't know you owned a store in France. The downtown part of Orleans does not allow street traffic, but you do have to watch out for the trams, otherwise, you can walk where you wish.

Orleans is the first stop in the Loire Valley. We didn't stop at every little hamlet or we could not have kept our schedule, but we enjoyed seeing the French country side as we got further into the trip.

Tours is actually the last stop in the Loire Valley and we chose to stay overnight there as well. We stayed in a B & B over 100 yrs old that was just delightful and only a few blocks from the train. Again, we had plenty of time to walk down to the old town part and other sites in the city.

Bordeaux was our last stop before heading to the retreat. We entered one door of the train station and out the back to catch the tram. We rather liked Bordeaux and spent another night there after returning from the retreat. Bordeaux is much larger than the other cities we visited enroute.

The next morning, we road the tram to the railway and boarded a train to St. Foy La Grande for our retreat. Plum Village and the retreat will be the third and final story of our time in France, and most definitely the longest. We actually have two sets of pictures for Plum Village. Chris took about 100 pictures and Kian, on of our fellow retreatants took a few 100 and was generous enough to download them on our computer before we left.