Finally a holiday


We're in France. It's been six months since we were this side of the channel after Coronavirus had us in varying degrees of lockdown. We've missed three campervan holidays and I was only sure this one would happen when the Eurotunnel train departed from Folkestone yesterday evening.

We crossed beneath the channel at 4.50pm and arrived at Saint-Langis-lès-Mortagne, France at 10pm. It was our third or fourth stopover on this quiet aire. It was still light, and we shared a bottle of white wine sitting on the step of the leisure door looking down the hill towards the lake. Cleopatra was parked on the grassy edge of the hill with four other vans, the main parking spaces of the aire already taken. It mattered not - we had the better view.

We were asleep by 11.30pm and awake by 6.15am to get back on the road. As I write this first blog post in months we're half way through this morning's final stretch to Île d'Oléron. I've lost count of the number of times we've been to this beautiful island, connected by bridge to the west coast of France. We'd talked of this summer exploring Croatia or Italy but with borders only just having reopened and so much uncertainty about the pandemic we decided to stick to the familiar.

For this trip we've bought a chemical toilet we can use in the utility tent in which we've previously used a rechargeable portable shower. It means we don't have to use communal toilet and shower facilities on a camp site.

I'm still having reservations about having come on holiday and I'm hoping that in a couple of hours when Cleopatra is settled on her pitch I'll be reassured and pleased that we did. I'm sure when I'm sitting on an unpopulated beach later I'll start to relax and enjoy it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

West coast of France campervan tour

Image
Having decided there's no need to travel half way across a country between camping stays, to mix things up a bit, this summer's fortnight holiday will be spent along France's West coast, starting at Ile d'Oleron and then heading a couple of hours south for each of our other two bases. We were worried about a reported two hour delay near to the Folkestone Channel Tunnel terminal and so, before the Dartford Crossing, we put back our scheduled train by 90 minutes. The traffic was just clearing as we got nearer and as it turns out we'd have been ten minutes early for our original booking. The delay meant it was already 10.30pm by the time we were on French roads and wouldn't reach our chosen aire, Neufchattel en Bray, until 1am. Unfortunately the aire was completely full and so we had no choice but to continue. We arrived at our second choice of aire at 3am. The two extra hours drive through the night meant two hours less the following day though. We d...
Read more

Probably the best aire in France

Image
  Driving days are rarely exciting - we're not ones for stopping to sight see when we've an ultimate destination to get to. So the discovery of La Chute du Grand Baou for our pre-ferry crossing stopover was the best surprise.  While Tony was driving south through France I was researching aires that would leave us with a short drive the next morning and I had a shortlist of three. La Chute du Grad Baou was top choice because of a promised waterfall. I thought I could make out people swimming in one of the website's photos and I'm never one to turn down an opportunity for wild swimming.  We arrived in Brignoles at around 5pm and popped into Lidl to do a small shop for food and wine for that evening. Then we filled up with diesel before heading 15 minutes north to the aire. A short dirt track leads down to a small restaurant with tables outside. To the side are three huge terraced fields for motorhomes. There was one other motorhome there already, hugging the shade from th...
Read more

Valencia

When I came to add our latest trip, I noted that the last blog entry was October 2022. Oops. We've been much better at keeping our YouTube channel  up to date. There you'll find at least half a dozen videos from the summer of 2023 when we went 'Huttopia Hopping' - that is to say we stayed on six different Huttopia campsites over our six-week road trip, from the Atlantic coast, across the Pyrenees and over to the Mediterranean. Back to the present and we're just home from nine nights on the continent. Our ultimate destination was Valencia where we spent five nights at Devesa Gardens.  We didn't rush our drive down, though I guess some would say we did. We stayed on a Camping-Car Park about an hour south of Paris for night one. Knowing it would be 10/11pm when we went through Paris we thought the roads would be quiet. They were not and I wouldn't ever want to go this way again.  The Camping-Car Park at Souppes Sur Loing was a nice peaceful site. Only two other...
Read more