Loire Valley

We've started early today. We had a long trip to the remaining castles and then to Lyon, avoiding highways. We've seen one by one: Chateau de Villandry, Chateau Azay-le-Rideau, Chateau de Chinon, Chateau de Rivau, Chateau de Chenonceau and Chateau de Valençay. We didn't enter, didn't have time for it, so we didn't see anything at Chenonceau, it was well hidden.
The road outside the highway was not so bad, a lot of speed limitations (30 - center, 50 - through the locality, 70 - before a curve or intersection, 90 general limitation) but we didn't take them into account so much. We've driven as the road allowed us, paying attention at the radar signs (radar was presignalized with 100m).
Driving on these roads gave us the chance to see the real France, not only what you see driving on the highway (nothing). In conclusion: good roads. A - highway, N - national road, Dwxyz - less numbers after D, the bigger the road - well, a D with 3-4 numbers is like a good road in Romania. The GPS took us on a very narrow road between some very small villages, but even that one was good, without holes in it.

With the GPS we had other adventures. Once, when we had a bigger distance between 2 castles, it said 120km. From what I've seen on bing maps, the distance should've been much smaller, and mostly the drawing was not minimum (not even close to a straight line). As for the time it said 140min, so it wasn't quick neither. On the GPS the setting was "optimum", so I changed it to "shortest" and surprise, 75km and 90min, a big difference. So we went like this, on the shortest, and we were careful not to enter every small road that the GPS would've said, so we arrived in 60min.
On Valençay - Lyon, on optimum I had 371km and on shortest 360 so for 11km it was not worth it. With the time we were not on the same line, GPS said 7h30 and we made 6h15 with 2 pauses, gas refuelling, some shopping at the supermarket and missing the street when entering Lyon, so instead of going near Lyon, with speed, we went through the center, red lights and roundabouts. So 5h i think it should've been correctly.

The best news is that my window is working fine again :) it's like new. i didn't do anything, it saw that I'm not giving it too much importance and it cured itself :) so we had a moral boost perfectly timed before the road to Lyon.

This evening we don't have internet in the room, they say it's because of the renovation works in the hotel that wi-fi is not reaching anymore, so i've posted (the romanian version only) in the morning, before leaving. The route for the next day is Lyon - Geneva - Lausanne - Luzern - Winterthur. Depending on how it will go (we will avoid the highways again), we'll jump some of them or enter through Zurich also.