Waking up early after a hard day of driving is not always the best thing, but when you are not sleeping well anyway it’s rather inevitable – better to get up and make the most of it.
Kostas and I bid farewell to his mate, thanked him for putting us up and headed off to try and remember where the hell we put the car, and to try and find some breakfast.
Thankfully, we managed to find the car and our first task was to get some fuel, with the needle on the fuel gauge still sat threateningly quite far into the red. After quite a lot of faffing, we managed to find a BP station on Avenue LaPlace just to the south of Cite Universitaire, topped up, grabbed some random pastries and headed off down the E5/E50 towards Poitiers, a place we’d vaguely heard of and seemed about halfway between Paris and our evenings destination of Bordeaux.
As a note on the toll roads vs. non-toll roads it’s a pretty straightforward choice – if you want to get somewhere with minimal fuss, pay the tolls and use the payage routes, they are excellent, have almost no traffic and get you where you want to be – if you have lots of spare time, the weather is nice and you want to see little french towns then give them a miss. We were on a schedule so had to use the toll roads.
We made it to Poitier around midday, parked up and went for a wander in search of lunch. We found a nice restaurant which, if my memory serves me correctly was called Le 16 Carnot on Rue Sadi Carnot. The food was lovely and Kostas immediately fell in love with the (admittedly stunning) waitress. Poitiers is actually a rather pretty little town, not much to say about it other than that to be honest! Also, if you are going to hit the town centre, there’s a decent underground car park there under the main square.
We took some more pictures and headed off back down the E5 towards Bordeaux where we arrived around 6pm. We found a place to stay in an Ibis Budget, which was nice and clean despite essentially being a cupboard with bunk beds but it had parking and was pretty central, also cheap.
We headed off into town and found somewhere nice to eat, having wandered around and taken touristy pictures…
I had a good nights sleep, but according to Kostas there was clearly a couple having a very nice time in a room nearby with the lady being rather vocal – I didn’t quite believe him until the morning when as we were packing up the hotel was treated to a repeat performance…
Anyway, tomorrow we would be off into Spain!
Notes and Points
- Eating pastries while driving will cause crumbs everywhere, no matter how hard you try to keep tidy
- Greeks require coffee in the morning before becoming functional
- Make sure you have a fair bit of change for the various toll booths on the payage route
Route
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