In years past, Arçais, with its interweaving network of variously sized canals together with a few lakes and a larger river, had been one of my favoured locations for hunting odonata (dragonflies and damselflies). The French, by the way, have…

One of the potential problems of travelling without a solo car (towing a caravan) is going shopping when you get where you’re going. Parking a camping car like Frodo isn’t necessarily the easiest of tasks. Mercifully, in France at least,…

The French for free range chicken is poulet élevé en plein air. We have some on our Arçais campsite. When we last stayed here eight years ago, the gardien was a chap called Francois. He, we are told, is now…

After a 12-hour overnight crossing from Portsmouth, Frodo disembarked in St. Malo at 08:00 on Sunday 11th. We’d chosen the route because we wanted to catch up with friends who live at Arçais in the Marais Poitevin, which is just…

As it turns out, we have broken our journey north at exactly half way. We did about 470kms yesterday and Sally Satnav says we have 471kms to go today. So, it should be another 7 hours that would get us…

We have two days to tow Guillaume the 940 kms or so from the south of France to Ouistreham ferry port in Normandy. We finished loading/packing and were on the road by 09:00. We didn’t have a set goal in…

There’s a small display of very good wildlife photographs in one of the sheds on the campsite. It seems they have the Eurasian Scops Owl (Otus scops) in the vicinity. It was calling last night accompanied by a Tawny Owl…

Yes, yet another market, this time a Sunday market. We had more rain overnight so I was glad I found firmer ground to park the car on at the side of our pitch. Somehow, between spells of rain on the…

The threatened rain turned up and it turned up in spades. Overnight we had a doozy of a thunderstorm as well as a mozzie buzzing around inside the caravan. Naturally the hammering rain woke us up and then, having heard…