September 18, 2017
Day 0 - Transit to Saintes
After a busy evening swapping tires and racks onto the Traveler XL, we got a good night's sleep and were out at (for us) a respectable hour in the morning.
We drove through some heavy rain showers between Toulouse and Bordeaux, which did not give us a great feeling about the weather for the week to come. But we arrived in Saintes with no problems and found our hotel "Citotel des Messageries" pretty easily.
We unloaded the bike in the narrow street in front of the hotel and moved our luggage into our room. I did the quick reassembly required after taking it out of our car, and we parked it behind another tandem (!) that was sitting in the covered courtyard of the hotel. The hotel, like all we've been to in France, was pleased to offer us free and secure bike storage.
We had chosen Saintes as a starting point because it had a covered parking lot where we could park our car off the street. So we drove over to the car park, parked our car, and went down to speak to the parking attendant in the little office. I wanted to make sure that it was OK to leave the car overnight.
The attendant not only said that was OK, but offered us a better deal on the parking - a multi-day pass that saved us a bunch of money relative to 10 days of 24-hour parking. So we returned to the hotel happy and confident that the car would be safe for the duration of our tour. It's nice not to be worrying about that on top of everything else!
We spent the evening nosing around Saintes. It's a nice little town!
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