Tuesday 3 September 2019 - Tours to Toulouse
We slept in a little after our first night in Tours, then checked out of our hotel just after 9 am and loaded the Renault Clio with our bags. The sky was low-hanging cloud with the odd break of sun—perfect driving weather, really.
By 9:20 am we were on the A10 southbound, merging onto the A20 at Vierzon. It felt good to be back on the autoroute—wide lanes, gentle curves and not too much traffic for a weekday. We settled into cruise control and let the miles tick by (not that you’d know it from watching the speedo lol).
Around midday we pulled off at a motorway service area just south of Limoges to stretch our legs and refuel—both the car and ourselves. We grabbed two jambon-beurre baguettes, a couple of pains au chocolat and coffees to go, then found a sunny patch of grass beside the aire to eat. The only soundtrack was the distant hum of trucks and a lone magpie hopping between picnic tables (it was eyeing our crumbs, I swear).
Back on the road by 12:45 pm, we continued through Brive-la-Gaillarde and skirting Cahors before the traffic petered out again. The A20 carried us steadily towards Toulouse, the landscape gradually flattening into fields of sunflowers and maize.
We rolled into Toulouse just after 3:30 pm, navigating the ring road before dropping down into the city centre. Check-in at our hotel was a breeze, and—tick another upgrade lol—we found ourselves in a room with a view over the Garonne. After two and a half days of winding medieval lanes, it felt marvellous to be back beside a river.
We spent the late afternoon wandering across the Pont Neuf and admiring those terracotta roofs gilded by the low-sun glow. Dinner plans were still up in the air, but first things first—unpack, freshen up and maybe, just maybe, sit down with a glass of local rosé.
