Planes, trains and (French) automobiles!

Let's see what happens when you mix 2 brothers and 2 sisters-in-law with a map and a French rental car and set them loose in France for 26 days!!  The four of us have studied maps, read reviews, consulted with each other across the country (thank you ZOOM!), and made all our reservations...now we just have to wait 'til May 1 so we can start the adventure of "4 Hunts in France".

Babette and John

Gary and Kathy

Together, we will be flying into Paris, and catching a train to Tours where we will pick up our rental car....a trusty Peugeot 5008.  We will head to Amboise (to see beaucoup des chateaux), Sarlat (to see Neanderthal cave paintings), Carcassonne (to see a fortified medieval city that is now a UNESCO heritage site), Collioure (to dip our toes in the Mediterranean and get a splash of Catalan culture just 15 miles from the Spanish border), Avignon (to enjoy the heart of Provence and celebrate John's birthday), Annecy (to see an alpine town on the Swiss border and hopefully get a little taste of John and Gary's Swiss heritage),  Colmar (to enjoy the Alsace region near the German border...also where we will say "goodby" to our rental car), and then head back to Paris by train for the last 5 days of our trip.  With the exception of Paris, this is all new territory for the 4 of us (well, Kathy was briefly and miserably in Carcassonne many years ago...but that's a story for another post!).  We will be spending 3-5 nights in each of those towns, and taking lots of little day trips to explore the surrounding areas.  We will be staying in a mix of apartments and hotels (a nice balance of some "together" time and some "alone" time!) and have our fingers crossed that after reading about a million reviews, we picked some awesome accommodations!  Our goal is to stay right in the heart of each city we visit and feel like "locals", if only for a few days.  (I'm not sure if I'm more excited about the Avignon apartment with a hot tub on our private patio, the Paris apartment with the pink Smeg refrigerator, or the Sarlat apartment directly overlooking the little square with the cafe, the fountain and flower stand below!) 

John and Babette have been charged with wine research (no surprise there!) and daily mapping and route selection (rumor has it that John loves studying maps and picking the best daily route...and let me tell you, he has the Michelin French road map which, when opened up, is 4' x 4', so we won't miss any of the small country back-roads !!!).  Gary and Kathy are on restaurant and daily sightseeing research (so far, in addition to the obvious attractions, we have our eye on possibly visiting a small goose farm that produces foie gras, canoeing on the Dordogne River in the shadow of the famous Loire Valley chateaux , cycling part way around Lake Annecy, perhaps visiting a gin distillery in Provence which uses local botanicals, seeing the 100 hunting hounds get fed at once at Chateau de Cheverny, and who knows what else...?!). I know we will most definitely enjoy great food and wine along the way, see loads of beautiful scenery and quaint villages, share lots of laughs (and hopefully have very few mishaps!), all while creating memories that will last a lifetime!  We wish we could take you all along with us, but since we can't, we hope you will enjoy following along with us on our blog!  (And feel free to comment...we'd love to hear from you!)