Ending Up Anywhere

Tuscany, the furthest yet we've travelled in Cleopatra, was to be our second campsite for our three week European tour. We set off from Huttopia Le Plage Blanche in France's Jura region at 6.50am. We stopped once for diesel and a wee. One difference between driving in France and Italy is that Italian motorway service stations are not self service. We arrived in Marcialla at 3.45pm. The coordinates in Tony's Google Maps sat nav were a little off and we had to reverse back up a narrow stoney track to get back to the main road before navigating the narrow streets of the town all over again to come out on a different side. When you know where you're going, the campsite, Camping Chianti Panorama, is just two minutes out of town. When I'd emailed a reservation to the site the previous week the reply came back addressed to 'Miss Cleoptra' with the prices for her and her two human friends. That was a lovely touch and showed they'd clicked the link

We used Huttopia's La Plage Blanche as a convenient stopover on our way south. The intention was we would go to Switzerland but the forecast for rain all week prompted a change of plans. Quite a major change of plans since Tuscany, where the sun is, is quite a distance further than Switzerland. Anyway, this blog post is about Le Plage Blanche, which translates as the white beach. The site is nowhere near the sea, being in the east side of France, not far from Dijon. We spotted the beach just as we arrived, at the bank of a river where many people were swimming. There is a perfectly good pool on site so I have no idea why. Our pitch for our brief stay had a countryside view across fields. You can pay slightly more for riverside pitch. Opposite our pitch was a trailer tent with a couple who drove away with their bikes on the car roof just as we arrived. To our left a British motorhome was our nearest neighboring three pitches away. I knew them to be British when the mo

We booked a site we return to again and again, Town Farm in Ivinghoe in the Chiltern Hills. We've always bagged a pitch on the hilltop overlooking the valley below. The sun sets over the valley and it's just beautiful to sit and take it all in with a glass of wine. On this occasion I'd managed to book a pitch with electric, I've no idea how. However they didn't mind us ditching the hook-up and parking Cleopatra at the field edge. It's often very windy on this site but winds kept below 15mph this weekend and we were able to leave our awning up for the duration of our stay. As has become our weekend ritual when we stay here we cycled to the cafe on the Ashridge estate for a full English breakfast before continuing on to Berkhamstead and back via Aldbury where we discovered a second village pub we've not spotted before. Saturday afternoon was spent relaxing in the sun with our Kindles and some bottles of real ale. On both evenings we sat in front o