Loire Valley - Orléans to Tours Tour Reviews — 1 to 9 of 9

We elected to purchase a dinner package. This was helpful as it made sure we had reservations at suitable restaurants where we sampled French haut cuisine that we likely would have missed had we not bought the package. In France, many smaller towns have limited dinner service on Sunday and Monday evenings, so having reservations in advance saved us from going hungry a couple of times. We also elected to purchase a château tours package, as we anticipated long lines at the ticket windows for château tours.

Our accommodations were excellent. All of them were well suited to cycle tourists, providing safe and secure places to park our bicycles overnight.

The rental bikes we used were very suitable for touring and well-maintained, and came with repair kits that came in handy when we experienced a couple of flat tires. The rental service was very accomodating when we wanted to change our pedals to SPD-style pedals and replace a non e-bike with an e-bike during the tour. The e-bike had a removable battery so we could charge it in our hotel room.

Tripsite provided an app for our smartphones, “Roadbook for Discovery.” The app proved to be useful for navigating the trip stages as it would notify us when we were off-course, provide use with descriptive information for places of interest and the availability of food and picnic areas along and near the route. It also includes an “SOS” feature that we did not need to use. Having the routes on our GARMIN GPS devices with European cycling maps would have been an improvement in navigating the routes. We learned to rely on the Loire Vélo road signs for most of our journey. Having a GPS is helpful when the "official" route is blocked or detoured.

We did two back-to-back Loire trips for a total of 12 days and 250 miles. The chateaus were fabulous, the countryside was spectacular and the rivers and forests were verdant and lush. We highly recommend these two trips.