Road Treep!

I recognize that purists would be horrified by such a decision. Savvy travelers would lecture me about the importance of staying someplace that is the very opposite of the Comfort Inn. But certainty and reliability have their charm. I can sell the concept of the Comfort Hotel. Sleeping in the car has now been removed as a potential item in our itinerary.

Next step, get the car. I have to go back to the airport, de Gaulle. (I've got a rate of just $217 for four days, though at one point they tried to stick me with a rate of $529. They backed down.) The journey to de Gaulle on the RER train takes forever, and then I go to the wrong terminal, and when I finally find the Europcar counter it is besieged by a mob of Englishmen. A single employee stands behind the desk, talking on the phone with a worried expression. The queue doesn't move. I cannot suppress the thought that, although Europe has fabulous museums and train stations and cathedrals, in America we have some rather sublime rental car facilities. They've got Sacre Coeur, we've got the Alamo counter at LAX.

One of the Brits finally succeeds in renting a car and shouts "Got keys!" as he runs down the concourse. In the course of the next hour and 15 minutes, I have plenty of time to contemplate the downside to being a spontaneous person.

Eventually I get the car, a Ford "Foo-kus," as the agent puts it. An hour later I'm back in Paris proper, and after loading up the family, we're on the road, heading south on the A10.

Two hours later, we're in the Loire Valley, walking toward a humdinger of a castle.

The valley is lousy with these chateaus, and this one, Chambord, is perhaps the biggest, most ostentatious, in some ways least approachable, for it is parked in a vast wildlife preserve, isolated in space and time.

The brochure informs me that Francis I had it built in the early 1500s, though it wasn't finished until Louis XIV did his Sun King magic the following century. The thing is impossible to look at without thinking of Cinderella's castle. It definitely could use a roller coaster and maybe a flume ride.

I buy a map in the gift shop and look, in vain, for some kind of Guide to France.

Evidently people who make it this far have already got one.

The map, however, helps us negotiate the villages that line the Loire River. On both sides there is a levee, on top of which a two-lane road is a motorist's dream. We pass more castles looming on the bluff. We drive through Vouvray, a white-wine mecca, and my spirits soar as though I'd just had a carafe. Wine country! Who knew????

We eat in downtown Tours in an Italian restaurant in a cobblestoned square, and my wife and I pop into an English pub where the bartender says the locals speak the most perfect French in the entire country. Pearls before swine, in our case, but it's nice to know that all those words we can't understand are beautifully articulated.

The motel, we discover late in the evening, is not the Ritz. It is not even the Ritz Express. Without air conditioning, we are forced to keep the window open, but there's an electric sign buzzing outside in a fitful manner that makes it sound as though it's zapping mosquitoes the size of eagles.