Chartres

After a relaxing day doing nothing much more than visiting the market on the Wednesday, which is always great fun in France, we decided to go a little further afield on Thursday and visit Chartres. What a beautiful city - and we nearly missed it all because of those flipping height limiters on car parks. We have a fairly high car and when a roof box is added it makes it far too tall for car parks with height limiters. Most of the car parks which we could find were underground and therefore out of the question for us, however we eventually found one down in the lower half of the city which didn't have any limitations on height. It turned out to be pretty well placed as it led to a small street which then led onto steps etc which came out at the back of the cathedral right in the heart of the old town. We sat at a pavement cafe to have some lunch looking up at the cathedral, listening to the organ music which was filtering out because we thought that the cathedral would still close for lunch as most places in France used to do. When we made our way round to the front we discovered that it was now open all day and we could have gone inside at any time. The area around the cathedral is very pretty with old houses/shops and beautiful flowerbeds. I have noticed that they seem to be going in for themed flower beds in France these days with a lot of colour grouping and they did look very pretty. I came home with lots of new ideas and more information on how to execute some older ideas.