I hope you're going to clean up after yourself

Day 53 - Bergerac to Bordeaux

Our last day of driving as we leave Bergerac headed for Bordeaux. We stopped at Saint-Émilion for a quick look around as well as a coffee and a bite to eat, finding once again though that these tourist towns appear to be geared towards larger restaurant meals. We are also in serious wine country now so there were numerous expensive looking wine shops with giant bottles of red wine. We finally found a little cafe/patisserie in a courtyard, but winced when our two cinnamon scrolls and two "flat whites" cost €25 ($40 ... ouch!).

While driving to Bordeaux we were reflecting on our three week road trip of southern France and how it was easier than expected. Google Maps of course has made navigation around the world much easier for quite a while now, but combined with ChatGPT to not only plan itineraries and daily routes but to give us guidance on things like where we should park, it takes all the stress and angst out of driving on the other side of the world.

We are staying three nights in Bordeaux but we have to return our rental car to the airport first. As our apartment allowed for early luggage drop off we stopped on the way through, but were taken aback when we walked in and found the cleaner lying on the couch eating a toasted sandwich while scrolling on their phone ... I wonder if they're paid by the hour?

Filling up with petrol in France has not been so easy, the majority of the service stations are unmanned and we've found that most of them don't accept our credit cards so we've been constantly driving around trying different stations and ending up paying a lot more per litre at a manned station. On top of that 85% of stations in the Bordeaux area are out of at least one type of fuel, as France is in a nationwide fuel crisis due to the Middle East issues and panic buying. It took an hour of driving and four service stations before we found one that had the right fuel and accepted our cards.

After dropping the car off we caught the tram back into the city, did some grocery shopping and settled into our apartment a hundred metres from the very impressive cathedral.