We’ve spent a pleasant week in the Marais Poitevin with Mike & Linda but now it’s time for us to head south. What we haven’t done yet is pay for our 8-night stay at the Arçais camping municipale. francois, the man in charge, was not around yesterday when, normally, we’d have paid. With a 320-mile/500-kilometre journey ahead of us towing Guillaume, we needed a reasonably early start and nobody turned up by the time we hit the road. We decided to leave the money with Mike & Linda (they do know Francois) and taped a note in very bad French explaining on the door of the acceuil [reception]. Hopefully the gendarmes would not be chasing us down the autoroute to Fanjeaux.
We were not looking forward to some sections of this journey. We had done the route down the autoroute to Bordeaux and round it a couple of years ago, solo, and the roads around Bordeaux had been a snarled up nightmare. Happily our fears for a repeat performance were unfounded and we sailed around Bordeaux with no hindrance. What a dull autoroute the A10 down to Bordeaux is, though, at 55mph/90kph with Guillaume in tow. We hadn’t noticed when flashing past mile after mile of nothing but trees with no views beyond when driving solo. Now, Francine was getting very bored with nothing to look at and no navigating to do. 😉
The forecast for our run into the deep south had been good. The weather was apparently set fair for the remainder of the work and temperatures were supposed to climb markedly. The forecast seemed accurate, for today, at least; as we approached Fanjeaux the car’s thermometer was reading 29°C. I love it. Let’s hope the accuracy remains for the rest of the week.
Nadine, farmer Luc’s wife spotted us arriving on the single track road to the farm and left the sheep milking sheds to welcome us. We went on down to the campsite to get Guillaume installed and have a very necessary beer or three.
We haven’t quite got the site to ourselves, there is a French tent on the back row, which is level and suited to tents.
Leave a Reply