Dordogne

After the Auvergne cycling in '99, I went on the Dordogne single-base holiday in the middle of July '00. The idea was that you got dropped off by van every morning and cycled back to the hotel. Unfortunately I chose the week leading up to the Bastille Day holiday, for which I was punished by rain, a spell of fine weather just having broken as I arrived. This meant that it was cold, wet, and hilly enough to be not fun. Worse, the supplied itinerary booklet was badly enough edited to be nigh useless, and ambiguously worded enough that on more than one occasion I had to exhaustively take all routes out of a village and proceed some miles along each one to be certain it was the wrong one until I found the one actually alluded to (not helped by the French habit of signing random and different habitations at each junction).

That somewhat soured me to the idea (and I swore that next time, I'd take a GPS receiver with me for just such an eventuality)