Road Treep!

But it's clean, the staff is friendly and the price -- about $150 for two rooms, not including breakfast -- isn't bad. We can survive. On a spontaneous road trip, every man's motel is his castle.

Day Two

We wake up and decide that, awful as it is, we'll stay a second night at the Comfort Hotel and just explore the castle country by driving more or less in circles.

We stop for coffee in a hole-in-the-wall along the Loire. We pop into a wine cave and purchase a bottle. We go to Chenonceau, a castle built on the Cher River with the water flowing underneath. There are formal gardens and a 16th-century farm. The castle clearly could use a TV room with a plasma screen, but otherwise you could throw some killer keggers at the place.

We drive off to Amboise, where there's another castle, and then we see more castles as we drive all over the place, and eventually wind up back in the old section of Tours, eating at an Irish pizzeria. It's good. I'm guessing that the guidebooks have overlooked this local treasure.

A great day, all around.

Day Three

A bad day. Everything goes a little bit wrong.

We drive 125 miles north, through Normandy, where imagining tanks on narrow village streets is by no means a stretch. But our objective, the beach at Deauville, turns out to be a longer drive than I had anticipated. Distances are hard to gauge in Europe: A two-hour drive turns out to be, when you do it, more like four. And at the gas pump, you just have to avert your gaze from the price.

Deauville itself is quirky, more English than French in its architecture, and devoted to a horse-track culture that makes it seem a little like Atlantic City or South Florida. But we just miss the public market, and a lot of stores seem to have been shuttered, and the beach itself is a little disappointing. We're Florida people, and spoiled.

There are murmurings about possibly returning to Paris. I douse that notion and drag everyone off to Rouen, which I think is just 30 minutes away but is more like an hour. I've found, online, yet another Comfort Hotel. It's like a bad habit I can't shake. This hotel is in a part of the city that shuts down precisely at 7 in the evening. There is litter all over the pedestrian mall, and panhandlers. We walk across the Seine to the cathedral that Monet loved to paint, and then find a very, very French restaurant where the waiter is snooty and the onglet steak just needs a spiked heel to be ready for resale by Manolo Blahnik.

After we walk back to the hotel, we discover that we just missed a light show at the cathedral.

The guy in charge of this road trip is clearly an idiot.

Day Four

I've lost my audience. We go home. We do not even stop and see Giverny along the way.