Tours was one of the places along this part of our journey where our experience was determined less by what we wanted to see than by the practicalities of travelling with a motorhome. We would normally have spent some time exploring the city, but we could not find anywhere where we felt sufficiently comfortable leaving the motorhome unattended during the day. With everything we were carrying inside, we preferred not to take the risk simply for the sake of visiting a city centre. We therefore stopped in Tours only to do some shopping, stocked up with what we needed and then continued our journey.
It was a little frustrating because Tours is one of the principal cities of the Loire Valley and there would certainly have been plenty to see. Its historic centre includes Vieux Tours, with its narrow streets and timber-framed houses around Place Plumereau, while the city also has the Cathédrale Saint-Gatien and the long history associated with Saint Martin of Tours. It is a city with a much more substantial historic centre than most of the small villages through which we had been travelling, but on this occasion we saw very little of it. Travelling by motorhome sometimes means making exactly this kind of decision: a place may be interesting, but if we cannot find somewhere where we are happy to leave the vehicle, especially for several hours, visiting it properly simply does not feel worthwhile.
Tours therefore became a practical stop rather than a sightseeing stop for us. We did the shopping we needed, spent only a short time there and moved on towards the quieter towns and villages of the Cher Valley, where parking the motorhome was considerably easier and we felt more comfortable leaving it. It was certainly not a judgement on Tours itself, and perhaps on another journey we will find a solution that allows us to explore it properly, but this time our experience of the city was simply part of the less glamorous but very real side of travelling for weeks by motorhome: finding supplies, deciding where the vehicle can safely be left and sometimes changing our plans accordingly.