Reverse order: Châteaudun

I'm back in Saint-Aignan after three days in Paris. It was a good trip. Yesterday we left the city at about 8:15 a.m. and spent the day on the road, arriving here at 5:30 p.m. The distance we covered was about 175 miles — a lot of it on little winding roads.

The car I rented for the trip to Paris was this one, a Kia Rio. I rented it at the SuperU supermarket in Saint-Aignan.

I call this reverse order because the first photos I'm posting come from the last place we stopped. It was the the city of Châteaudun, about 90 minutes north of us and little way south of Chartres.There's a big château there, as you would imagine, and also a big church called L'Eglise de la Madeleine. I don't know much about it.

Actually, I stopped in Châteaudun to visit the public toilet there. In France, if you travel around the same region a lot, pretty soon you start noticing and remembering where the public facilities are. Or the fast food restaurants, which you can sneak into to use the toilet. I've been to Chateaudun several times over the last 10 or 12 years, and knew it would be a good mid-afternoon pit stop. But passons...

Wikipedia doesn't tell me much about the church in Châteaudun — just that it is a Catholic church (duh...) and that it was listed as a national monument by the French government in 1922. What I can tell you is that it's enormous seen from inside, it's perched on the edge of a cliff above a ravine where there's a road and a lot of houses, and it's absolutely luminous inside because the windows are huge and made of light-colored glass.