The sun, the heat, the flies….

It’s hell out there Carruthers, but someone has to do it…  The heat is rising again and we are on the move again.  This time to the east – the Jura – somewhere we have only visited  in passing.  It has mountains, trees and rivers though and sounds cool and inviting.

Setting out is a real pain.  We have become over-casual about the packing and do not do enough in the cool of the previous evening so have to run around collecting all the forgotten things as the sun starts getting nasty.  Do tempers fray?  Maybe they do.  Cool is certainly lost in more ways than one.   Next time everything bar the fresh stuff will be sorted out  days in advance for a cool and collected start!  Of course it will.  It is only when we are an hour away that for some reason we start thinking about passports and driving licences and EHICs.  Well – I have the passports.  I carefully took them out of the pouch with the other valuable documents and put the rest carefully back in a safe place indoors:-(  Apparently it is an instant fine if you cannot produce your driving licence when asked.  For the past 16 years they have stayed safely indoors.  Oops. Should we turn back after such an inauspicious start?  We don’t.

The aire at Autun is next to a lake with a marina but no swimming.  There is no shade to park in but trees a few yards away by the water.  The parkings are narrow, as if marked out for cars but signposted for mohos.  Like the couple of vans already there we take our one-and-a-half pitches and, edging our rear overhang over the kerb behind us, discover by ear where our spare tyre is slung. Underneath in a sturdy metal cradle as it happens.  No harm done.

Apparently the town is full of roman ruins and medieval buildings so we take the 15 minute uphill walk to Centre Ville as the early afternoon sun beats mercilessly down on the cobbles.  Towards the top a beautiful quadruple avenue of trees gives a couple of hundred yards of shade and hosts the post-prandial boules match.  Another tree lined square at the top provides shady café tables and cool, cool drinks.

Perrier menthe – icily refreshing and probably cleans your teeth at the same time.

We wander the medieval streets and churches for some time.  Back at the aire several more vans have turned up and edged in.  People have now broken out their tables and chairs (not strictly allowed in aires but done everywhere) and are sitting in the shade of their own vans or under the trees having the evening apero.  At least the unencumbered view of the sweltering southern sky means we get satellite because our mobile wifi is having difficulty getting enough bandwidth to do very much.

A good night’s sleep on the level-enough surface and we head off to Les Trois Ours campsite  in Montbarrey on the Loue. Plenty of scope for weak jokes there.  We can have a standard pitch for the normal rate or pay extra for river frontage.  We opt for standard this time but our cable is too short to reach the electrical point so we end up with riverside anyway.  🙂  And what a pitch – mere feet away from the river with some shade and satellite reception.

The awning comes out and is draped with sarongs and towels to extend the reach of the shade.  I blog in the relative cool – wifi reception (our own) is adequate here if slow. We both swim. It gets hotter and hotter and we swim both at dusk and dawn.  Showering becomes optional as we are in and out of the water all day anyway.  Neil grows a beard.

The downside – the flies!  Mon dieu!  The first day there were a few – but only a normal sort of number. The second they seemed to have multiplied in the heat and by afternoon were pestilential – but only under the awning – fastening themselves to its underside and the shade on the side of the van – providing an easy target for Neil’s deadly swat.  So the solution was simple – the flies could have the shade of the awning and we would have the much cooler shade the trees.  The lady at the at the Accueil claimed it was due to all the rain this year.  That rain is getting the blame for a lot of things. The number eased off again the next day when the weather cooled a bit. Or maybe Neil had actually killed them all.

It was a lovely stay. Lovely river, lovely wild life, lovely weather for sitting in the shade beside the river.  Or in the river.

We had expected a small shop on site but it was not stocked up yet although you could order bread for the morning.  The nearest shop was seven kilometres away – too far to cycle. Even in the cool! We had just about enough food and drink, supplemented by a meal at the cafe on site.  And there was a bar on site as well – so no need to panic!  But definitely need to get a gas barbeque. Even when there is a breeze it does not seem to blow through the kitchen end.

I had plotted a two day return looping further east to some lakes and waterfalls but we decided to head back for some guaranteed cool at home and because storms were predicted in the next day or two.  We had one stopover at L’Etang-sur-Arroux. Another campsite on the water’s edge – beautiful for a swim.  Too expensive this one (27.50) but I had expected an ACSI discount since it offered them until 9th July.  The dates are not inclusive though and 9th was the first day of full prices. Boo.   Too few and too far for the sanitaires but good site-wide wifi and excellent shade (and satellite!).  And no flies – so Neil could rest.

Things learnt:

• Get the van sorted before the morning of departure.  We have a check list for making sure the van itself is ready (things shut, turned off etc) but what we need is a list of things to retrieve from the laundry, the fridge, the bookcase, the electronics cupboard, the back of the car etc.
• Pick up your required documents
• No danger of us ever changing a tyre – you need specialist equipment just to get the spare off. Maybe we have it in the tool kit.  But could we jack up 3.5 tonnes with any degree of confidence?
• Be prepared for campsite facilities not being as advertised – provision up.
• The 3 roaming package has its limitations due to French providers strangling  bandwidth (or some such technical miserliness).

get home, chill, plant…

We extended our stay at Beaulieu by a day as it was so lovely and we needed time to adjust to the idea of packing up and moving on.  We will probably return in August when the school holidays are coming to an end.  Many years ago on a campsite at L’Amelie-sur-plage  a French Daddy with baby Mirabelle on his shoulder told us the rain always started on 15 August so French holiday makers tended to go home.  So – an opportunity for quieter visits. Here we are in 1990, in our first tent on our first trip – just behind the dune on the Atlantic coast.  Our favourite site until we found Beaulieu.  This site really has changed now – it has expanded by acquiring all the plots around it and putting in lots of fun things:-( The coastline has changed too and the dune has been reinforced somehow with boulders and concrete, limiting direct access to the water.  We probably won’t revisit this one on our nostalgic wanderings.

We pack, fill, empty, pay and leave to get back to the fermette with only one night en route. This will be in Chambon-sur-Voueize, Limousin.  It is a Municipal campsite and therefore cheap (7.80 inc electricity). It is a delightful site – old fashioned, shady laid-back.  We do the same sky pondering, judging the angle of the sun for the time of day, position of trees and park optimistically up.  Yay – satellite works and shade is abundant.

We take a walk into town.  We are brought up to think England is full of wonderful historic towns and cities, which it is, but why are we so unaware that France is even fuller of them. And they don’t make such a song and dance about it,

just look after them and enjoy them without heaving crowds of tourists.

The temperature has fallen nicely so we sit in long trousers and enjoy a little drink in the peace of the countryside.

To get to the campsite we (together with the locals) had had to weave around several ominous route barée signs suggesting complications for the next few days. The Gardienne of the site compounded the confusion by shaking her head sorrowfully saying we will probably have to leave before 8:00 to get out at all in the next three or four days.  We had not seen her before parking up as she had gone off to a school function apparently.  So we are a bit aggrieved at having committed to such bad arrangement – it takes a couple of hours to get up and go – so a 6.00 am wake up:-(  Eventually her pompier husband says what she said is rubbish as they do not arrange roadworks in such a way as to cut entire villages off for three days so we take a chance and sleep a normal night.  In the end we leave on the road we want at 10:30 and all the signs have magically disappeared. Pouf!

An uneventful ride home and we find the recently planted geraniums on the terrace have not died – hurrah! It has been raining on and off here it seems. The soil is therefore perfect for digging up a section of turf to make a bed for a few tomatoes.  There is a natural spring that runs under our tiny terrain opposite the house.  This spring feeds the lavoir next to our plot and means that the ground there is nearly always well watered.  In fact, stick a spade in and, apart from cracking your elbow and jarring your teeth by hitting a large stone,  you will find the hole you create gathers a puddle in the bottom. The beauty of this arrangement is that I will not have to water the tomatoes every day in the heat of the summer.  Well – that’s the theory and I have three tomato plants overdue for planting out.  The other main danger is slugs and there has been mole activity in the past.  Hopefully the recent wet weather has driven them to our neighbour’s drier plot.  But don’t tell him I said so – he has a bit of a war going on with them:-(

Now we need to go away again and see if they survive!

Before that we have some days out to enjoy.  A brocante at Champallement is lovely and we buy a brass bell. But forget to take pictures.  Eating our sandwichs de jambon we sit next to Annie and are chatted to in a variety of languages she thinks approximate English but owe a lot to German and or Dutch.  We receive an invitation to her husband’s vernissage (which means a preview of an art exhibition in case you were wondering  (I was –  had to look it up later.)).  They keep a bohemian, international open house most of the time apparently, so looking forward to that.

On the way back we go to the spooky Gallo-Roman remains of Compierre in the nearby woods.  This is an amazing array of ruins of what was a substantial town spreading several hundred meters into the wood, complete with amphitheatre.  It feels remote and only one other car arrives and leaves while we are there.  A site like this in the UK would be a major tourist attraction. Here we wander the full length of the site with no-one else in sight.

Neil sits on the walls of the temple

but they have been wanting you to desist from climbing on them for some time…

Bit of a patchwork of our travels this time – sorry – but with one giant leap I am now only a couple of weeks behind!  It would be better to be more contemporary as so much detail is lost in a few days:-(

Plus ça change..

A meander in the river Dordogne……

the remains of a medieval city…….

a tree-covered island in the stream – which is nowadays a tranquil campsite.

I hardly know where to begin when it comes to talking about Beaulieu and Camping des Îles – it was one of the first few wonderful campsites we discovered in 1994.  We returned for a few days every year for ten years, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends or family always with a bigger, better tent and more kit as finances allowed.  So it means a lot to us. Over those years it changed hands from a low-key family-run affair to a more business-like operation but never lost its cool, green charm.

We arrive as the temperature on the road hits 31 degrees. Just as we approach the ancient wooden walkway that spans the very narrow road to the site, the manager is leaving in his van.  He waves us back and points out the height under the  walkway is 3m dead.  And we are 3m 10cm!  Disappointment clutches our hearts.  Mercifully, he indicates there is a back way in over a new bridge and if we hang on for ten he will lead the way for us.  Much winding back through the streets later we reach the Accueil from the other side. Phew! Optimistically clutching my ACSI card in the hopes of a good discount the receptionist says we can have a big discount OR a premium riverside pitch. Given the 31 degrees we opt for the riverside. (22.40 per night inc. hook up.)  Ah well. I guess we will have to economise elsewhere.

In this weather good pitch selection is premised on two things – shade and satellite reception.  In that order.  I figure out belatedly, that, unfortunately, the sun and the satellite occupy pretty much the same part of the sky.  South in general for the first and 28 degrees east of south for the second.  Hmmm.  The van will need to be fairly precisely positioned between the trees to to get both.  We try a couple of pitches and then, melting in the heat, tuck Portia into a piece of shade that may give a sliver of a view of the right piece of sky. It doesn’t. But with good site-wide wifi we don’t need the satellite.  We can still get Radio 4 on the internet.  Hurrah!

Straight into the water! I don’t think so.  The water is 15 degrees (according to a naval chap a couple of pitches down).  Getting in was a series of gasps and yelps and determination.  In the past we have been here in August and it seems to make a difference!  Also, due to all the rain, the river is currently very high and strongly  flowing – usually it runs relatively gently over the stones at this side and only has a deep fast channel over there by the trees. It is only eighteen inches deep but  I am worried about being dragged away over the stones because I seem to float on surface of the flood rather  than sink to the bottom.  Neil seems OK but is hanging on. Clearly women are  more buoyant with all that subcutaneous fat. Well – that’s my story:-)  I find a stick for anchoring myself and bob about like an oversize pink ice cube.

In the morning the sun does not hit the van until about 11.00 and stays on us until about 14:30.  So the positioning was not a complete failure for shade but it is so hot it makes only a couple of degrees  difference inside.  All windows are open and all fly screens closed, the awning is out.  I drape beach towels over the open windows when the sun sneaks in around the side. No chance of cooking inside in this heat – we must get a Cadac gas barbeque to use outside.  Portia has a connection for the barbeque already installed but a good barbeque is quite pricey.  We have yet to figure out how Amazon works in France. You can also get effective 12v fans  but I had already dismissed that idea because they cost £78.00! To balance the baking daytime heat we get we get beautiful sunsets and balmy nights.

It is 23 June – an auspicious day. The last one when we will be complete Europeans but we didn’t know that then.  We postal voted a couple of weeks ago.  We are surrounded (loosely speaking) by chatty and friendly Swiss, French and German campers, plus the British naval chap Nick and his wife Meg.  (Nick is the only other person we have seen swimming – mad dogs clearly. There is also a sun blasted swimming pool by the way.)  He wanders over with a bottle of fizz and suggests that we meet up tomorrow to celebrate or commiserate accordingly.  We laugh at the thought of Leave taking the day. Ho ho ho. We leave the radio on low overnight: a slight hint of Leave doing well up North as we drop off; puzzled commentary on Leave doing better than expected in the middle of the night; shocked analysis when we wake up and find Brexit has done it.  Quizzical, sympathetic looks follow us on our shamefaced walk to the showers that morning and many conversations are had during the day.  It seems the Swiss don’t like the open borders either (had a vote) but can’t leave in protest as they are not members.  But they may now have another vote.  We share the fizz later anyway.

Beaulieu has shops and resturants 200m away in town.  We have scoured the traiteur on the square for lasagne but ended up with cold roast chicken (very nice).  We bought local strawberries at the SuperU – the area is known for them – and they restore one’s faith in strawberries. The next day we mistakenly walk out much further than expected to the Intermarche in the almost-midday sun and find some lasagne in the traiteur section.  Supermarket lasagne?  Hmm.

Our fears that in the last ten years the campsite would have become over-developed was not realised.  It has cetainly become more sophisticated with more fixed pitch rentals and a bigger swimming pool.  The sections away from those facilities have stayed just as tranquil and green as before though.  The sanitaire block near us has just been done up and is fabulous!

We had visiting ducks here as well.  I finally got mine in a row….

and gave them some stale baguette (pre-soaked, to spare their little throats).

Things learnt:

• get a compass to pinpoint the exact location of the pesky satellite
• get a fan – this now sounds like a great (early) birthday present! The heat only lasted a couple of days before dropping to a tolerable (for me) 25 degrees- phew. I can see heat is something to be taken seriously in a motorhome.
• find out how Amazon works in France when you only have a “le Bourg” address and a personal post box round the corner
• check where the shop actually is before you start walking out to it along hot roads – it’s always the assumptions that catch you out!
• supermarket traiteur lasagne is not as good as the independents’  but not bad either
• mattress toppers are great. Tried these out on this trip – Neil slept on his now-redundant duvet and I used the thinner double topper folded over. Both are great!

Animations dans la campagne

Rural France puts on some wonderful events during the summer.    Some could even be described as magical, such as last year’s prosaic-sounding international mosaic conference at La Châpelle-St-André.  It was a small conference by any standards and together with live mosaic demonstrations it had  a display of  jewel-like mosaics in the XIII century chapel with this huge stone and crystal-encrusted clam shell as the star of the show.

If you apply a small lens to the holes in the side you see the grotto of shining amathyst crystal inside in kaleidoscopic vision. If it hadn’t had a price tag of 7,000 I would have cleared a room at home and taken it away. They also created a more straightforward mosaic mural representing the area to attach to the Chapel wall.

This year there was a musical weekend at the nearby Chateau de Corbelin which rivalled it for unexpected charm. The chateau itself is of the heavy, monumental kind rather than the more delicate, ornamental sort and is beautiful in itself. 

Its gardens make it truly remarkable: the formal gardens laid out with roses in full bloom make a fragrant walk and the water gardens add a soupçon of poetry.  Just to make it truly inspired there is a pianist playing Beethoven on the terrace: the music slowly becomes discernible as you walk down the drive to the entrance, and then drifts along beside you around the flowerbeds and streams.

From the sublime to, well, another sort of rural sublime – a vintage car rally in a village near us.  This consists of many lovely old cars processing from one field in the middle of nowhere down a rural road to another.  And then coming back again.  It is not a race – more of a moving (in the kinetic sense) exhibition.  And the cars are cute.  Many of them pimped up or stripped down for racing.  Many of them parked at the roadside with boot or bonnet open to cool the tired old engines over the lunch break.  There is a big marquee for diners who want sandwich de jambon and frites but most people seem to be seasoned rally goers and have come with trailer, awning, barbeque and food.  It starts to drizzle so after the frites we decide to skip the next run of the cars from A to B and leave the field before it becomes a quagmire.  Parked in a similar field for the Fêtes des Anes a few years ago we, along with many other fête-goers, had a very muddy struggle to leave the mealie-field car park after a heavy burst of rain.

We go on to a brocante in Montapas – beside the lake.  We love these – half loft clearance, half low grade antiques, half jumble sale – we have picked up enough junk over the years to take a stall of our own.  We have picked up some lovely stuff to furnish the fermette too such as this pendule, which keeps good time and has Westminster chimes which strike every quarter with only one note missing. On the hour it only ever strikes one.  We keep meaning to bring it home and get it fixed by Mr Farbrother in Shipton-by-Beningborough, who has fixed other clocks for us and Castle Howard.  But we seem never to get round to it.

• French chateaux events can be magical, inspired places.  If I were in charge I would add a tea room.
• Take a flask of tea wherever you go (see previous point). Then you can always have half a pint of it whenever you want if that is what you like.  And I do.
• Westminster chimes have the same four notes per quarter in a different order and sound odd when the third note is missing (dong, dong, blank, dong….dong, blank, dong, dong, etc) but strangely appealing once you get used to it.

Tomorrow we set off in the van again.

A la fermette

For the third day in a row we awoke to birdsong – this time a nightingale!  Truly wonderful.  We had heard it late at night for the first time when we brought the car over in April.  June is a bit late for them to be singing though and it stopped after a day or two.  They sing during the day as well in case you were wondering.

This time we awoke in a bed in a room.  The fermette is a 200 year old farm worker’s cottage built from stone with amazing wooden beams.  Maybe it was a small holder’s cottage as it has a barn and a stable attached.  The top of the house used to be a hayloft meaning the living accommodation was just the two long narrow rooms below.  These are now one big room and the former hayloft is a landing and bedroom.  Knocking through to the adjacent stable there is a toilet and bathroom and, now, we have a second en suite bedroom on that side as well.   It is a small house which nonetheless has two staircases – a complicated arrangement due to improvements made at different stages by the former owners and then us over the past thirty or so years.  I am sure you can discern all this from the photo!

Old farm houses tend to be a bit musty when left unoccupied for weeks on end.  The 55cm thick walls keep it cool in the summer, when the temperature can climb up to 40 degrees, but also mean that letting in a bit of heat and damp air causes quite a lot of condensation. Apparently when it has been wet this is especially so!  It felt a bit dampish and the tiled floors became slick with condensation.  Being upstairs and with wooden floors, the bedrooms are OK though.  We need a fire to dry the room out and keep us warm in the evenings.  In the following few days the sun comes scorching out and the daytime temperature soars airing the rooms nicely- but the temperature plummets again in the evening.

The main room and the spare bedroom above it – now in use as an office!

So we enjoy the next few hot days gardening, riding our bikes a tentative bit on the lanes, and getting sorted out before the weather changes for cold and wet again.  Then we just sit it out – no hurry to get anywhere, plenty to do on the fermette.  We see from the weather forecasts (yes, we have a satellite dish that gives us the BBC and most other british TV and radio) that the UK is having even worse weather than we are. No real consolation in that though.

My cycling improves in short outings in the late afternoons.  I used to be fearless but now all I see is grit and stones whizzing by at five miles an hour (!) waiting to scrape the skin off my arms and legs.  My legs are truly feeble when it comes to the slightest slope  –  they strengthen noticeably over just a few days though! Maybe my technique improves too.

I take the plunge and get the really short haircut I have been contemplating since planning the travels.  This is not for noble reasons, like Ju, (nor as short) but to make life easier on the road.  I don’t like it.  The photo is small and strangely angled for disguise purposes!

The weather is not so bad that we cannot go out at all.  We are British so have flasks and rainwear about our persons at all times.  Our first outing to is do another part of the canal path walk along the side of the Canal du Nivernais.  Over the past few trips we have done several miles by parking the car at a canal bridge and walking up a couple of miles and then back. Next time out, we park by a bridge further along and walk down to where we stopped before.  Now we plan to do something similar but on the bikes and in the van.  We have nearly exhausted the parts of the canal nearby so need to do at least overnight trips to make it worthwhile.  We continue on foot for the time being  though.

By Thursday 16th the weather is warm again if a bit changeable so we drive to the start of the last section we need to cover to join up the other pieces we have done.  This is in Chatillon-en-Bazois a twenty minute drive away where the canal joins the streams  meandering  through the water gardens below the chateau and widens into a canal port.

We see some small fauna enjoying the water

and lovely canalside flora.

Well worth a few minutes contemplation

That’s it before this post gets too long.  We did not leave for another couple of days but I will make another post.  In fact I will still try to do a day-by-day blog when we are on the road but not when we are staying put on the fermette – it would be too boring!

 Finally in France

I have commented before that Stella has a penchant for goat tracks.  She must have resented my little joke and held a grudge ever since.  Today  she avenged herself by taking us down Ram Lane.   Of the several narrow white roads marked on the map that went off in the rightish sort of direction she chose this particular one.  No!  A narrow, gravelly, single track road with high hedges and overhanging trees.  Should we back out onto the slightly less narrow road on a bend behind?  Or assume that it would improve?  We proceeded and the road deteriorated.  Pot holes, grass down the middle, broken surfaces and puddles of unknown depth.  Hedges left leaves wedged in the hinges on both sides, branches scraped the roof!  Fortunately no on-coming vehicles.  But – enough of that mini drama – we have learned our lesson about optimism and tiny lanes!   After a very tense  and very slow mile or two Ram Lane turned onto a real road.

More slightly-dashed optimism as we arrive at the Eurotunnel terminal – all trains too full to get an earlier one than booked.  It was the middle of half term after all.  So we had a superfood chicken salad in the terminal while we waited – after all, we are new to this and need a break until we get the hang of it:-)

We set Stella to “Toll Free” and roll off the shuttle.  Finally – foreignish soil under Portia’s  wheels!  Our plan was to get down to the fermette in Burgundy in three stops taking a route west of Paris for a change.  From all the books we have about French aires I had selected Montreuil-sur-Mer for a first stop.  It is several miles inland in fact but we had decided to avoid the actual coast, where there are many lovely beachside aires, due to rubbish weather – wet, windy and cold. Our optimism that it would miraculously become sunny and hot as we arrived in la belle France was dashed:-(

Finally, optimism is justified as we arrive at the aire in Montreuil to find eight beautifully laid out pitches, with a nice view, only two minutes walk from the town centre.  In the coach park adjacent is a frighteningly automatic toilet (free) and a service point for water and electricity for a small fee.  What a privilege!  We could not be happier:-) Thank you people of Montreuil! We are the third to arrive and it fills up later.  We arrive just after closed o’clock (2:15) and go food shopping.

We know Montreuil from camping trips when were young and flexible. It is historically significant for many things but most recently as the British Army Headquarters under General Haig in  the First World War.

Now it is an attractive, busy old town with butchers and bakers and traiteurs.  Mmmm – a good chunk of the lasagne changes hands for a few coloured beads and shiny mirrors. We manage a little walk around the town and its medieval ramparts before impending rain sends us vanwards.

Settling in for the stay we find Neil’s carefully researched wifi access devices work outside the UK – hurrah! The satellite still picks up the BBC – hurrah! We seem to run fine without electric hook up (but are miserly in our usage).  Water and heating are running nicely on gas. All neighbours are staying quietly inside out of the rain. Resisting the newly acquired lasagne we eat last night’s deferred chilli but allow ourselves the fresh baguette – maybe we are beginning to get the hang of it.

I pored over All the Aires and France Passion to plot our next destinations.  France Passion is an organisation that lists places where self sufficient travellers may park overnight for free.  These are farms, vineyards and other local producers of various things.  I would like to find one of these if possible.

Things discovered today:

• trust your instinct not your satnav. Sorry Stella:-(
• remember the third dimension when approaching vegetation – width, length and height!  Easy to forget the latter. Easy to lose a satellite dome!  We didn’t as it happened.
• entering geo-coordinates is more complicated than it looks.  Fortunately I know Montreuil is not on a small island some way off the coast of Norway and, see first point, I revert to navigating by postal address!  There is a complicated mathematical formula to convert one standard geo-coordinate format to another.   Life may be too short to fettle this. Don’t you just love standards?
• be grateful.