Whenever we vacation in a new part of the country, we always book accommodations in a central location in the area that we’re going to explore. That way it’s easy to make day trips to the surrounding destinations and still be back “home” in time for an apéro and dinner. Staying near the train station has at least 2 advantages: you don’t have far to go to catch your train for your day out and the station is often close to or in downtown near the sites you want to see in your base city. A third advantage in Poitiers, at least, is that the station is multimodal; that is, you can catch a train, a long distance bus, or the city bus, all in the same location. For this trip that was important because 2 of the towns we were going to visit are served only by motorcoach. More on those starting next week but first we wanted to discover the “City of a Hundred Steeples”.

Earlier we wrote a post about the cost of visiting different countries that ranged from 7€ a day in Laos up to 300€ and more in the Caribbean. Western European vacations fell somewhere in the middle and blog reader Rich took on the challenge when he saw that in France the price would be 178€ for food and a place to sleep. His enthusiasm inspired today’s subject that revolves around finding a good deal or making them ourselves. Because all of our US to France vacations always started and ended with nights in Paris, that’s where we got our introduction to the words “good value”. 

We walk everywhere. Without a car, that’s a given, but then we intentionally chose a city where we could easily get to all of our daily needs on foot. A new hometown also had to have an efficient local bus system plus a train station that could give us access to other cities in France and all over Europe. The monetary savings were apparent immediately: no car payment, insurance, fuel, maintenance, parking fees, tolls, cleaning and detailing. No stress of fighting for a parking place, dings and scratches, parking or speeding tickets, theft. What we hadn’t considered were the health benefits and we just read about how to make that even better.