At the Chartres hotel we decided against breakfast, choosing instead to hit the road straight away and pick up coffee and sandwiches en route. Central France is in many ways like Central Australia, wide open and the farm equipment gets bigger the further you travel. The Central Massif is very flat and we watched the storms approach and pass over for hours.
We had pencilled in Lyon for 2nd stop but revised our plans when it occurred to us that Lyon is full of excellent restaurants, many of which would be quite expensive. We are travelling on a tight budget with our house in the van. We would not be able to properly immerse ourselves in the experience this time around, so we looked for an alternate stop. For a mad moment we considered Geneva as we could see how relatively close this was to Lyon. A quick check of booking.com brought us up sharply as we realised that the cheapest hotel would set us back a cool £500. So it was Saint Etienne, chosen both for the appropriateness of our route and the 90’s pop group of the same name.
Our hotel had been selected because it had parking, but on arrival the parking was not available, however we were directed to parking 2 minutes’ walk away. We are big fans of France’s underground parking. No matter how ancient the town or how significant the buildings, you can usually find and easily accessible car park underneath a city with reasonable parking charges. By the time we got back to the hotel with our overnight bags we discovered we had been upgraded to a junior suite on the top floor with a balcony, lucky us!
The First balcony… 
Determined to use the balcony even though it is March
It turns out Monday night in Saint Etienne is not an easier place to get food than Chartres on a Sunday. Most places were closed and not opening until Tuesday or even Wednesday. There were some expensive Italian places open but we settled on a local fast food restaurant which sold fantastic burgers with beer and wine. There is something a little disconcerting about taking your burger out of it’s paper wrapping next to your long stemmed wine glass, but I managed.
