One of the things to like in off season France is the big covered markets. Most reasonable size towns have one, with a range of wines, meat and cheeses on offer is almost dizzying in scope. Even the Bull Ring indoor market in Birmingham UK, where any good quality foodstuff known to the English can be found, struggles to keep up with the French.

Nestled into the historic medieval centre of Tours, the famous Les Halles indoor market, even off season, is worth a visit for any food interested person. And despite a tortuous one way system (Something shared with central Birmingham), is well worth a visit. From several butchers and three significant Fromageries, each with a range of at least fifty types of cheese, to wine merchants and suppliers of all manner of cooked and uncooked produce, I found it of wallet-depleting interest.

One of the benefits of visiting off season is the lack of crowds. The ability to pause, take stock and just drink it all in, without being bumped and bored by people trying simply to get past we gawking tourists.

Getting here by car was another matter. We got off the ferry from Rosslare at Cherbourg at around half past one in the afternoon on Monday and arrived in the middle of rush hour. A timing that was to cause us, or rather me, significant anxiety as Angie was still groggy from the Dramamine she needs to survive the nausea ferries always give her and therefore not fit to drive.

My good lady does not travel well, which is rather ironic because she and I love travelling and have covered several tens of thousands of miles by car and ferries alone. From driving the Trans Canada (Twice. There and back), across twenty four states of the USA (Victoria BC to Jacksonville, Florida), along the Princes Highway (Melbourne to Sydney) in Australia and all manner of shorter road trips in the past twenty plus years. That is without extensive air travel, which she also does not tolerate well, from the UK to Canada, the USA and Australia.

For my part I find air travel tiresome because I like my personal space and as Jean-Paul Satre once pithily observed; “L’Enfer, c’est les autres.” Hell is other people, especially if flying Economy. The ennui inducing hours flying across either the Pacific or Atlantic is best spent asleep. Drugs have sometimes proven very useful. Even two paracetamol have been enough to help survive the enforced inactivity from rotate to touchdown. But that is something I rarely do, especially if driving any distance within an hour of negotiating baggage claim, immigration and customs.

We found the hotel we’d booked into well enough. Dropping Angie and the most of our luggage off at our hotel I set off to find the off-site parking. However, a fog had risen, making trying to negotiate Tours unfamiliar one way system and narrow streets a minor nightmare Near collisions with buses and other vehicles in the cloying darkness were only averted by sheer luck on my part. Indeed it took me the best part of an hour to find the parking, find a place, lock up securely and wend my overstressed and jangling nerves back to our accommodation on foot.

Or as Angie said to me when we were safely sitting in our room, glasses of a half decent Cabernet Sauvignon in hand; “We must stop having these adventures.”

To which I replied; “You’d only get bored if we did.”