Why Montauban? Monday Oct 15th

It’s a 1 star sight according to the Michelin guide for the region.  But, we are coming to the conclusion that a 1 star is worth visiting but not driving out of the way to get to.  And, we’ve seen LOTS of cute villages.

We get underway, our first truly cold morning of the trip.  And foggy -- the GPS takes us on what's probably an interesting route but all we see is fog.

Before the trip my reading had made it seem like Montauban was someplace we’d possibly go more than once – a nearby city, etc.  But, having spent an hour walking around, I feel done with it.  One of the issues was that on Monday the stores are largely closed.  It's a problem throughout France in planning sightseeing.  BUT, especially here it was plain that there’s more interesting shopping in either Albi or Toulouse.  So, that’s not it.  We stop by the tourist office and they give us a map with a walking tour.  It’s boring enough that by mid point I’ve proposed that we abandon the tour and just take a walk across one bridge and back across the next so that we can see some water views and some views of the city, and then be done. 

 

 

One good/great thing came out of our abbreviated city walk.  We stroll past a restaurant called L’estanquet.  The name had struck me as vaguely familiar from my Tripadvisor restaurant research that morning.  It’s noon, and I try the door but it doesn’t open.  However, we’d seen a woman leave from it a few minutes earlier (I thought it might just have been someone who worked there) – Maxine tries to push the door, it opens, and we go in.  Great restaurant.  From a price-value standpoint, our best of the trip.  We actually wish Montauban were closer to Broze because we’d go back!  And a locals place, which is to us even more validating.  Here it is:

 

 

We leave town with a quarter tank of fuel in our car.  On the drive we pass hunters, and hunters cars & trucks, parked at various places on the roadside.  We see dogs racing across fields and at one point they even (dangerously) cross the road in front of us.  Fall hunting season.

But, we need diesel.  We try a gas station on the outskirts of Montauban, but it is an unmanned one, meaning that you have to have a European credit card (chip, rather than a magnetic stripe) to pay.  So, we can’t get fuel. 

We’re only about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Gaillac so we feel pretty confident that we have enough fuel to get home.  But, we soon learn that we have one of those cars where the gauge drops more quickly as the tank gets lower.  Continuing onward the gauge continues to drop and then, when we’re about 20 km from Gaillac, it chimes that we’re out.  Not really, of course, but at that true danger zone.

We’re more than a little nervous, we’re a lot (!) nervous.  There are no gas stations.  We’ve seen not a single one since that unmanned one even though we’re traveling on a major road between Montauban and Gaillac.  We’ve got the cell phone.  We’re on a road without shoulders so we’re worried that when the car coughs to a stop we might stall out directly on the road…  We coast our way, limp really, all the way back to Gaillac.  Incredibly tense.  But, finally we’re at our Leclerc.   We buy our $100 worth of diesel fuel, stop at the store for some stuff, and then head home to open a bottle of wine and toast our survival from a nearly really bad day!