2005 Letter from Amboise, continued: We naturally spent the entire morning at the market. We walked back across the river and ate lunch in the RV, and then went off to visit Leonardo’s Museum. It turned out to be a 2 mile walk from the center of town. Neither of us felt like doing that, so after walking for a while and taking pictures of the beautiful and ancient houses along the way, we turned back. Turned out that there was a little tram that ran up that hill, so we climbed on board and set out. When we got there, we found a huge line. The driver of the tram said it would be about a two-hour wait – and we don’t do that kind of line. We simply continued the tour. We are lucky. Unlike those visitors who needed to return to work on Monday, we could come back.

We had another great experience very early Sunday morning. There was a funny noise outside. It turned out to be the torch that heated the air in a large hot-air balloon. We’d hear a whoosh when the fire got high, then it would die down and there would be another rush of heat and air in a few minutes. The people in the basket waved as they floated by, suspended under a balloon made of different colored cloth segments. On Sunday evening, we heard the sound again and when we looked out, the same balloon was getting ready to take off from a field only a few feet away from the campground. We had the privilege of seeing it in the air twice!