This was the start of something new for us. We are heading for a 3-week escorted motorhome tour of the northern coast of Spain, beginning at the east end in San Sebastián near the French border and ending at the west end at Baiona, which is just above the Portuguese border. We need to be at San Sebastián on 6th September.
We’d chosen to take almost a week driving down through France before crossing the Pyrenees into Spain, so we’d booked a Brittany Ferries crossing from Portsmouth to St. Malo, actually overnight on 31st August. After treating ourselves to a table service meal, washed down with a very decent bottle of Chablis, and a restful night’s sleep, we landed in St. Malo at 08:15 local time this morning. The crossing was excellent.
Luckily we were pretty much in pole position for the formalities as we disembarked; only one other van was ahead of us at the passport control. The French official was pleasingly swift and we were soon picking our way through the streets of St. Malo; rather too swiftly for our satnav’s hopeless GPS receiver to have located us. Navigation Officer [NO] Francine resorted to Google navigation on her mobile phone until Frodo’s eventually kicked in.
Route Planning Officer [RPO] Francine had picked a potential first stopping point about half-way down the west side of France at Taillebourg. Here was a CCP [Camping-Car Park] site that was apparently a small [19 pitches] erstwhile camping municipal site. As such it has facilities, whereas many CCPs do not.
CCP is an organization that you join to get a membership account. Access to the campsites is barrier controlled using an automated electronic system. We have previously used them only once, a few years ago, when Francine’s membership card operated the barrier. The system enables you to see what the site’s usage and remaining capacity is like. Our target at Taillebourg was fine with 17 of 19 spaces being free.
With an interim supermarket break to buy three days worth of supplies and feed our caffeine needs, we headed south on the main autoroutes. Our toll tag worked a treat. Waiting for the ping as the first barrier rises is always a bit heart-in-mouth since, on one memorable occasion, our tag had mysteriously become de-activated.
Autoroutes are great for covering distance but can be notoriously sleep-inducing. I needed to stop for some more caffeine. After 280 kms, with the satnav route wanting to do a dog-leg around Niort, essentially two sides of a triangle, to our destination, we chose to dive off and do the remaining 100 kms on a more cross-country route, the third side of the triangle. That should be less sleep-inducing and a more direct route to Taillebourg.
Good though Google may be, its navigation is missing a trick. The satnav in Frodo allows us to set size information for our vehicle, thus helping it to avoid single-track roads with grass growing up the middle – at least when the GPS receiver knows where we are, it can. If only it didn’t tend to lose us with tedious regularity.
A mobile phone seems to maintain GPS much more reliably but has no concept of vehicle size. NO Francine switched to Google to home in on our campsite. With no available size information, Frodo found himself on a distressingly narrow, rather rough, single track “road” with grass growing down the middle. One vehicle did come the other way but we managed to sidestep it and finish the 4 km crossing of agricultural land. Frodo was shaken but not stirred.
We needed another sidestep in a typically tight French village to avoid an articulated low-loader threading its way in the opposite direction. We collectively breathed in and missed, finally arriving at our automatically controlled CCP barrier.
Francine waved her CCP card in front of the machine. It asked how much money to load but never got to a step that would open the barrier. Being slow learners, we tried again with much the same result. There was a second machine beside the first. This one had a keypad to take a “code from your app”. Francine found one, entered it, and at last the barrier raised. It seems the app has rather taken over from the membership card, which now just seems to enable you to add money.
Rather as expected, there did seem to be only one other van in residence. We picked a pitch in the open to avoid drips from the trees and got hooked up. Other than having to be careful not to exceed the 6 amp supply, we were in situ.
The rain began.
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