We'd Euro-tunnelled into France. This was a good and usefully located campsite: http://www.chateau-gandspette.com/gb.html near to St Omer, less than 20 miles from Dunkerque ferry port and little more from the Tunnel. (If you were to stay on the site, you probably wouldn't see a very fat, drunken woman with a strong Liverpool accent and a similarly strong tendency to shout, scream and lash out at her little husband. Their young teenage son looked so embarassed).
Next day: The back end of a barge - slightly better looking than the back end of a bus. On a previous visit I'd noticed this barge and would've been disappointed if it hadn't still been there. After a lot of driving where for entertainment there was little more to do than to concentrate on legal hypermiling, we'd arrived at the municipal site at Dole: http://www.camping-du-pasquier.com/index_eng.htm. We didn't swim, but saw a middle-aged woman swimming towards us from way up stream where no average swimmer would've thought to go.
Hypermiling? Increasing mpg by thoughtful driving. I'd been greatly helped in this endeavour when on a visit to http://www.brickwerks.co.uk/ near Huddersfield I'd agreed without any persuasion to have 2/3 of our van's holey original exhaust pipe replaced with custom-made stainless steel pipes without a cat(alytic converter)! I was assured that the van would continue to sail through emissions tests. The expected increase in power was quite surprising, but I effectively converted it into mpg reaching my magic 40 far more easily and generally at speeds between 4 and 10 kph higher than previously (depending on gradients, wind, weather, traffic density and all those other real world qualifiers).
The "pole" is a sculpture. Only two outer arches of the ruined bridge remained.
The river? It's the Doubs, dude.
Our French neighbour played in a book-learned, I thought, but smooth finger-picking style. I asked (of course), but he didn't know Barley and Grape Rag, nor Pistol Slapper Blues. As the fat moon glid (I like that word), glid up and over he provided us with a pleasant though banal and bluesless background buzz. And his wife ignored his music completely.
Next day: This road on a shelf has caused the town of Nantua in the valley below to be "left on the shelf".
Exciting aren't they, signposts to towns in the next country.
Mont Blanc's shoulders from a supermarket's car park in Sallanches.
Le Viaduc des Egratz. Over several visits to the area Jo has slowly left behind much of the terror it first inflicted upon her.
From a favourite campsite of ours: http://www.campingdesbarrats.com/camping.html
We'd cycled into Cham(onix). We like this shop. It sells nothing you need and too many things you (might) like, including posters like this: http://bit.ly/joGHf from the wonderful Bungalow Graphics: http://bit.ly/2CA6il. And I was surprised to see a shop called "Millet" which looked very much like our Millets.
It seems every time we visit there's another building blocking the views. Outside a closed-for-the-day climbing equipment shop rain-dampened enthusiasts watched a TV mounted in the window showing sunbaked climbers doing impossible things in Yosemite.
Heading "home". A couple more turns and we were parallel to the river Arve, so cold that it appeared to be steaming.
Next morning.
Adventure Girl Jo at Les Gaillards. In the right light and weather conditions one can see fabulous reflections of the snowy mountains, but on this morning it wasn't happening.
L'Aiguille du Midi and Le Glacier des Bossons.
Back in Cham.
Next door to the Mojo cafe (where the staff speak English).
Le Brevent.
Approaching the station for Montenvers.
Quite the koolest tickets I've ever seen. The artwork is, I'm sure, that of Bungalow Graphics.
It's only 3.2 miles from bottom to top.
Once away from the stations the gradient varies between 11 and 22%. That is steep. And if one of these coaches is upright, then the other certainly isn't.
Chamonix.
Arriving at the station at Montenvers.
We didn't go down. Jo would've bottled out anyway and me, I just didn't want to see too closely any more evidence of global warming.
I'd expected it, but I was shocked, sickened too, I suppose, to see where the glacier wasn't. What continues to shock me is that there are still a few people who refuse to believe that global climate change has not been caused by human activity. (Anthropogenic, now, there's a word). In August '09 I am equally shocked by the fact that the British government continues to do very little other than to say some of "the right things" and seems to believe that we consumers can consume our way out of a disaster caused by consuming.
Like the backside of a quarry.
http://www.ageofstupid.net/trailer - very relevant.
Arete des Grands Montets to the left, (l'Aiguille Verte is behind), and the pointy one is Les Drus.
After that astonishingly steep journey from Chamonix it soon became clear that we would be walking back to town.
In "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain said, "...A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work".
About ten years ago I got that bottle free with a cycling magazine.
Hey, d'you remember "hanging valleys"?
As an enthusiastic teenage "mountainist" I lived (and bought) through the general era in Britain of increasing and improving equipment. Now in the current lengthy era of observed heat exhaustion caused by folks unnecessarily wearing (and carrying) all that equipment, we ourselves are much amused by walking in high mountains while wearing sandals.
Reminds me of our grandsons and "Dora the Explorer".
Halfway down to the valley, Les Rochers des Mottets. Just when we were really feeling like bold adventurers...... We didn't stop.
There were some very sickly pine trees, some of them weeping resin through what I hoped were not beetle-bored holes in the trunks. It has been estimated that in large parts of North America the mountain pine beetle will destroy 80% of the native pines.
Back on the site in troubled evening weather.
Next day: Le Lac d'Annecy. We'd travelled from Chamonix via Megeve and Ugine. As always there were diversions caused, I assume, by landslides.
Annecy. Amsterdam-ecy?
Annecy was getting ready for a visit from the Tour de France. This bicycle had reached 118kph on the flat. (That's 73mph. On a touring tandem I once reached 56mph downhill on the A30 in Cornwall. With higher gears we'd have gone very much faster, I'm sure).
I remembered I'd promised myself I'd climb the 2351m La Tournette (up there in the clouds), but decided to leave it until another day.
I'm not fussy. I'd live in any of those lakeside flats.
South of Le Lac d'Annecy there are dinosaur mountains.
Watch for long enough and you're bound to see a pterodactyl........
Flocks of parapentes flew over this campsite. It's below the Col de Forclaz at Angon, next to Talloires on the east side of the lake (opposite the castle at Duingt): http://www.lelaccamping.com/En/Gallery.html and had long ago been recommended to us by our friend, Frank, originally an e-friend from Belfast via http://forum.club8090.co.uk.
"Le château de Ruphy, sur sa presqu'île, commande l’étroit de Duingt." Presqu'île is a word I like a lot. It means almost-island, or what you'd call a peninsula.
Next day: We'd driven away (past that awful VW garage at Doussard and), over the Col de Tamié by-passing Albertville then south on the D1006 parallel to the Autoroute de la Maurienne eventually swinging north again and up to Termignon on the edge of the Vanoise national park.
Travelling days, lunch on the road, kites overhead screaming for my food......
A mess in a place of beauty is not a beautiful mess.
East of Le Bourget (still on the D1006), noticing the Fort Marie-Thérèse and other fortified buildings near to the top of a pass I swung off the road and parked behind a minibus from Arnold School at Blackpool (Lancs., UK).
Esseillon Barrier.
Termignon.
You might think Jo had run over a cat, but the thing on the road was, as I recall, horse poo.
After our short ride around the small town of Termignon I'd gone for a blast up the pass and been pleased that on my way back I'd kept up with a real cyclist (although he'd probably been out for several hours, if not all day). Later I'd gone out again this time up the narrow track which led into the national park. We liked the simple campsite at http://www.campingtermignon.com/
Next day: I'd like one day to take the road northeast to Val d'Isere (a placename I remember from teenage listenings to Radio Luxembourg when skiing holidays there were advertised), but we were turning south for Italy over the Col du Mont Cenis.
Col du Mont Cenis.
Hydro-electric power causes ugly shorelines, but no carbon (once the dam's been finished), and none of that bothersome nuclear radiation.
Damned clanging cowbells, I could hardly hear myself not-thinking.
Zoomin', eh!
This being the Italian side there were roadworks, of course, and many of these pinky red buildings at the roadside. Had I been driving more slowly, I might've found out why they were there?
E70
We generally can't make it taste nearly as good, so we buy a lot of drinks of coffee. (Sometimes we re-use and nearly always recycle the cardboard cups! In the UK one can use ones own mug in garage-type coffee machines, but it seems almost impossible in mainland Europe). These services were memorable for selling porn-type DVDs from vending machines outside. Jo sent her brother a photo to prove it.
Soon we were travelling back towards France up a pass which a few years previously we'd descended on our way to Bologna.
I'd been chatting with the French bloke on the left. His motorhouse had been losing puissance all the way up the pass.
Montgenevre (back in France!). It's a ski town and I'd swung into the old centre to avoid the often unattractive modern parts.
All downhill to Briancon.........
Briancon in the far distance.
In the old city of Briancon.
Smartly conforming new buildings within the ancient town.
There are times when I would cheerfully sell my soul to the devil in exhange for a sunny balcony. (This would surely be a very good deal, because I don't know what a soul is, if it is, and I don't believe in any devil).
The teeshirt reads Work the Land. It's from http://www.howies.co.uk/. I found it in Kendal on a buy-two-and-pay-relatively-less deal.
Corrugated iron roofs, I like them so much, ungreen though they are.
"Briançon, the highest town in Europe". (The highest commune in Europe is St Véran.)
We were in a dilemma. Looking back it's hard to believe we were seriously thinking about making an offer on a (to us) extraordinarily expensive painting we'd seen an hour earlier of a sexy nude female in a semi collage style mainly in a dark red. We didn't buy it, but throughout the holiday it continued to cause us great and prolonged ponderings.
Mont Dauphin on the RN94 south of Briancon.
http://www.lagarenne-crots.com/. Our campsite was on the Lac de Serre Pancon, one of the largest artificial lakes in Europe. It was very busy and the poor lad on reception sent us to an already occupied plot. When we returned to the office we found ourselves queuing behind the fussiest couple in Western Europe. Were they German? We thought so.
I went on a short cycle ride into the wonderfully primitive countryside. In places the land was eroded like the Badlands and in others an excitingly scrubby wilderness.
Next day.
We crossed that bridge.... When we came to it.
And continued south to....
Sisteron, a favourite town of ours, but we didn't stop.
We were only a little surprised to find we'd previously visited these services. Again we felt we might be on the set of a remake of Vanishing Point, or somewhere very similar. Strangely the restaurant area was still both neglected and abandoned.
"Les Penitents des Mees are rows of columnar rocks 2kms long and over 200m high".
I suppose it's human nature which causes us to enjoy recognising locations we've previously visited. (We'd once breakfasted here at the Aire de Volx with its curious watchtowers).
A well organised Spaniard. By this stage we'd been blasting along the A9 in what seemed to me to be blistering heat. Cicadas rattled like manic maracas and nowhere in the service area could I buy anything I wanted to eat. Air conditioning is absolutely non-essential, but so good to have that one soon starts to think of it as an almost-necessity.
Route de Saint-Hilaire, Carcassonne, http://www.camping-carcassonne.info/. Good site, (poor website).
This "self portrait" is one of my favourite photographs. The book is very good too.
See bumfuzzle.com. (Chiefly used in the South Midland and Southern US, it means to confuse or fluster). By a huge coincidence a couple of weeks before we started this trip I'd been visiting http://www.brickwerks.co.uk/ and reading the latest http://www.volkswagencamper.co.uk/ which featured some of this couple's truly extraordinary travels.
The walled "citadel" of Carcassonne.
One of several theatrical types being theatrical.
"Work the land". Spare the poor cow and eat cheeseless pizza. Never once did I confuse a waiter with my unusual order - I guess it can't be very unusual. This was a very good cheeseless pizza. I don't miss "gone-off milk", or any of its by-products.
Pretty fair gig list. The previous night we'd missed Lenny Kravitz (which may be no bad thing).
I do very much like these "shade sails". They remind me of Brecon Jazz Festival.
I suspect these towers are older than those with the pointy roofs.
As we rode "home" we stopped long enough to watch frogs at first invisible croaking like lust-driven machines while above them flew butterflies with wings as blue-black as Tom Jones' hair used to be.
Night certainly adds an extra dimension to cycling alone in a foreign country.
It simply looked French.
Next day: first view of the fabulous Pyrenean mountains.
If I'd posted these in Flickr I could still have edited them at this stage, but I'm afraid it now seems like too much hassle to start again, go through Photoshop and re-insert the many such images as would clearly benefit from more tweakings.
Shortly afterwards we began to realise that we'd have to pay to park on the pass.
Hiding from the sun, me.
A very long way off, the top of the Col d'Aspin. A big lens shot.
Hand-turned hay above Aspin Aure. Too excited not to get on my bike, I was cycling up the pass.
He looked better than I felt, and was soon up on his feet.
That gang was posher than ours and had easy access to a large beer tent on the roadside.
"I'm the rural spaceman, baby....".
The Pic du Midi de Bigorre from the top of the pass.
The descent was thrilling. I have never been so fast so often for so long. There's no computer on my bike, but I've experience of previous high speed descents with a computer and I'm confident I frequently got into high 50mphs.
See the sweaty patches?
Cars with tents, and vans, continued to arrive and to fill every last space, including those which would never be anywhere near level. Goodnight. (Tour de France >>>).
An advert in my cycling magazine: "This is Todd. Todd only cycles at weekends. Todd pretends he's not puffed when he is. He rubs baby oil on his legs to make them look shiny. Todd likes to pump the air with his fist and say 'Whoo' a lot."
Yeah, but what about the snowy mountains!
Lots of daftness to follow - just let the Slideshow run.........
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It's a yeti. Yes, exactly.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
http://www.etaphotel.com/gb/reservation/recherche_destination.shtml Any good? I've no idea.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I guess it can get sillier......
From these very eye-catching Deuchs are thrown horrible little meat sausages.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The "caravan" has gone, the freebies have all been scooped up into those free musette-style bags and we're waiting for the cyclists.. ..
There's something undeniably exciting about the chatter of the helicopters. There seem to be so many more than could possibly be needed, unless thrumming up excitement is an official reason for the presence of half of them...
This man had been playing all morning. He was skillful, but seemed to play only one tune which I fancied was a Breton folky thing.
Like mosquitos....
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The leaders with a 5-ish mins lead (on the road).
All the riders' numbers: http://www.letour.fr/2009/TDF/RIDERS/us/engages.html
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The "yellow jersey" is Rinaldo Nocentini, or http://www.rinaldonocentini.com/ as he's sometimes known.
These poor buggers get (nearly) as much applause as the leaders (on the road, or of the tour).
The "broom wagon" into which are swept those men too exhausted to turn a pedal.
We'd crawled back down the pass in long queues of cars, motorhomes, and spectating cyclist and walkers, then rolled along to the municipal site at Saint Gaudens, Belvedere Des Pyrénées (which is exactly what it was).
Although it was all in really good nick, clean, tidy, recently decorated, the site reminded me of many in Scandinavia which seem to have been frozen in time for about 40 years. I like that.
83 pitches in all - mid July - half a dozen were occupied.
Towards........................Spain.
Next day: The enormously large site of an enormously large Gallo-Roman villa - montmaurin.monuments-nationaux.fr/en/bdd/pdf/1 . We'd arrived at lunchtime - we generally do - and ate in the van while waiting for the staff to return and unlock the gates.
About 13.59 a woman drove up and unlocked the entrance gates and office. About 20mins later a man drove up and followed her into the office.
"Gallic-style hexagonal temple with altar fireplace".
Yup, marble. By now the late arriving member of staff was showing us around. He'd surprised us by speaking in very clear English (with an oddly variable accent), and by smelling very strongly of what was surely too much alcohol to be driving. He'd been born in Australia, but had travelled a lot and was more comfortable in French than English, he said. Although he was the caretaker he was also a useful guide for the many European visitors who speak no French, but have learned English, or American.
Hypercausts. Hard to imagine, let alone to calculate how much biomass would've been necessary to warm these buildings.
The pool.
They used marble in much the same way as we use floorboards, plasterboard and wallpaper!
The cold dip.
Are those Romans (and Gallo-Romans), still relaxing here after 2,000 years of sunny afternoons?
We were in Biert where to compensate for having spent a "night on the bare mountain" while we waited for the Tour de France, I'd booked us into http://www.veganholidayfrance.com/index.html. I was too keen and should have been more cautious when making the booking. I was told, "We're full, but we've got my son's attic room, if you're desperate". "We're not desperate", I said, "We've got a very good campervan." As we were shown to our room I was third in line on the steep stairs when I smashed the top of my head into a low beam. I staggered and collapsed into a crumpled heap, stared dizzy-eyed at Jo and groaned, "I didn't hear the warning". There hadn't been a warning. It's hard to believe, but four more times I bashed into that beam before we left next morning.
Parked in the village square we had an unsatisfying snacky evening meal.
Blimey, I wouldn't want to live there and see that several times a day.
Odd, aren't they.
This is a dehumidifier making a tremendously bad job of removing the astonishingly hot air from our attic room. You're right, we didn't sleep well.
Next day: After a breakfast no-one could describe as generous, we drove east through Massat and up the Col de Bels, on down to Foix, out past Carcassonne and only once we'd left the mountains behind did we shake off their gloomy weather.
North on the A75.
The Cirque de Navacelles is nearby - like this, but even bigger.
Madières.
Montdardier where there was an open but tired campsite with one tired motorhome visiting. It was a site you'd put into the "adequate" bracket and I couldn't persuade Jo we should stay there. Nor at the next one, down in the valley at Avèze, so we rolled into Le Vigan and onto the .......
http://www.valdelarre.com/ just in time to go to the poolside bar, drink green beer (with hideous results later that evening), and watch the end of that day's stage of the Tour de France (won by a non-French rider thereby creating not much excitement). That British couple were there again. 25 summers, was it they'd been coming there? I think the old chap might be losing a marble or two, but his wife speaks to him with loud and fierce impatience.
Next day: Sumène - looks good, doesn't it, down by the river under the recently refurbished yet obviously ancient wall. But the dog muck, man..... C'était dégueulasse!
Inside the depth of the town wall.
Dubonnet, the most frequently seen "ghost sign" in France.
The plaque shows the heights of autumn floods in 1812, 1847 and 1958
Well maintained terraces on which these folks were growing a lot of useful grub. We were on a sat nav "shortest" route of about 50 miles to a campsite near Florac, but under provocation (such as when I adapt the route, i.e. ignore the instructions for a while), the device twice took us to roads which became narrow untarmacked trackways. Never mind, eh. Gives the locals something to laugh about.
Saint Martial.
We lunched here amongst the sweet chestnuts on the Col de la Tribale.
I'd thought he might want to share my lunch, but managed to keep it to myself.
The owners had towed their bikes on a trailer to the campsite at Le Vigan. The towing vehicle was a white (VW) T4 with a sticker on the back which read, Plain Clothes Police Car.
Near to the summit of Mont Aigoual, a very tired looking '70s-style ski resort. On a previous visit to Le Vigan I'd thought of cycling up this mountain, but I'd've found it most horribly difficult. (If only I'd taken action on reading that beyond a certain age which I've passed, it becomes increasingly difficult to lose weight).
On the Col de Perjuret descent I was shocked to see the cyclist looking so smashed. Roger Riviere died here in 1960 on the Tour de France. A time trialist, all round talent on the road, and a three-times world pursuit champion he was positioned to take the lead in the Tour, but hit a guard-block on the verge, fell 10m into a ravine and broke 2 vertebrae. "Through the '50s it was clear to observers that riders were doping. There were pictures of racers with dried foam on their faces, or of riders driven mad by a combination of heat and amphetamines stopping in the middle of a race to find relief in a fountain. After riding until he collapsed Jean Malléjac lay on the ground still strapped to his bike, his legs convulsively pumping the pedals. Others would remount their bikes and go the wrong way...... Roger Rivière crashed... because he had taken so much of the opiate Palfium to kill the pain in his legs that he couldn't feel the brake levers."
Ah, the village hall. http://www.camping-chondutarn.com/, a good site bounded in part by (that fence and) the Tarn river.
With a fabulous disregard for safety (apparently), an elderly chap pottered around the site on one of those mini tractors (which looks like a rotovator and trailer) with a dozen or more children hanging on and off it.
An extraordinary-looking church the more modern part of which built apparently from recycled materials.
Wow! All that space! We'd agreed we'd stay here for four nights, have a "proper" lazy holiday. We nearly managed it too.
The Tarn. I'd gone looking for what sounded like a hoopoe, but was a green woodpecker, a flash of yellow in the woodiness.
Happy families were swimming and playing in the lazy water, but I didn't take any photographs of them because (Jo wasn't with me and), I didn't want anyone to mistake me for a perv. What a very sorry state of affairs it is when one feels obliged to not include anyone else's children in an image.
Next day: We were avoiding the Tarn gorge and taking a southerly cross-country route towards Millau.
Still we haven't driven over it - the Millau bridge, the highest in the world.
Know where we are? In the square in Le Caylar. Again.
We went into this wonderful shop where the Belgian owner perhaps overheard something we'd said - he speaks four languages well - or really did recognise us even though two years had gone by since our first and only previous visit. He offered us a cup of chai and we declined then I wondered why, and accepted. It tasted of not much at all, but for the next 24hrs I felt at least as well as I ever have. Ever. Yeah, that good.
Old villages grow out of the rock. We sat-navved on shortest routes across the back of nowhere on very narrow roads of occasional steepness.
The rain was trying hard to catch us.
In the Tarn gorge proper.
What's the quickest way to your house?
Up the gorge du Tarn.
Did you notice the climber in the previous shot? Back at our campsite I went for a ride on rough tracks up the side of the Tarn and stopped on a high cliff to look across the river. Alone opposite was a soaked-through 17yr old chap in nothing more than shorts and climbing barefoot (obviously), down the cliff to a position from which he might make another enormous jump into a deep pool. I was wondering which route I'd take down my cliff to rescue him when he let out an awful roar of shock and fear and, whacking his head and shoulders, ran across the cliff in a most extraordinarily reckless and frantic way then sat down gasping and began to remove the bee stings. I was reminded of the story in which Mowgli led the red dogs past the hives of angry wild bees before his jump over the cliff and into the Waingunga river.
Next day: Approaching Montelimar (he said, reaching for a Savoy Truffle). Looks German, I thought, this bridge. Being in the Rhône valley almost always feels good to me. I've been to its source, and to its mouth in the Camargue, and to quite a few points along its 505 mile length and it feels comfortable to be around it.
Crest. We'd landed at a busy-busy Dutch-run and clearly Dutch-preferred campsite where we'd once previously overnighted.
The Drôme and a view I'd much anticipated.
Wandering in Crest.
Hobbit-hole passageways cut steeply across the level-running streets.
Hemp growing in the council's display.
Next day: East towards Die. Jo was driving. Must make a note of that somewhere.
In Die. Even if they were as dull as a candle, they'd still be "brilliant".
What? A Big Sheep made you do it? We passed an alleyway called Rue Palatin and that made me want to do a little research (because Lancashire is / was a "County Palatine").
East from the square by the church, Die.
Next to our table on the terrace, a Simca Aronde as manufactured between 1951 and 1963. Column change, leather seats... In the UK one anticipates an accompaniment of damp carpets and thick flakes of rust.
Elegant, eh. "Aronde" means "swallow" in Old French.
I have a thing about balconies.
I walked part way around the castle walls. Never before have I seen walls so ready to fall. But I have since, in a mud-brick built kasbah in a February rainstorm in Morocco. The resourceful builders had recycled chunks of Roman columns and statuary into the 13th century walls.
Somewhere along this stretch we picked up a hitchhiker. He looked quite African, talked quite Spanish, had very little French and not much more English. He was a climber of big mountains, not "just" a rock climber.
Yes.
Some of that snow had fallen overnight. Really.
We dropped off our hitchhiker to allow him to continue south and east. Soon we were picnic-lunching down a short track where I spoke with a Swedish Volvo-driving holiday maker. I pointed out very obviously that he was a long way from home. "And so are you," he said, which surprised me - I hadn't thought we were. (The southernmost tip of Sweden is slightly further north than Newcastle-upon-Tyne).
Mont Aiguille.
Approaching Grenoble. About 50mls north we found a very relaxing campsite..........
Camping du Flon, at Yenne, no website, well signposted. And that's the mighty (and at this point very much managed) river Rhône.
I was away on the bike for a look around. Here's the 16th century salt store in Yenne.
A fabulously extended farmhouse.
It was that wiring, of course. Around the town is a walk with informative plaques (in French only) about it's convent, etc. Generally it looks to be a place with a past very much more important than its post war present.
There was a plaque to a "martyr of the resistance" and then this "ghost-signed" cafe, "La Dent du Chat", The Cat's Tooth, which one feels might well have some less obvious colloquial meaning, and below it reference to Soudan (Sudan). La Dent du Chat is also one of the summits of the Mont du Chat west of the lac du Bourget, at Aix les Bains.
La Dent du Chat est un des sommets du Mont du Chat, s'étirant en bordure ouest du lac du Bourget, dans le département de la Savoie
Next day: A few years earlier we'd stopped for breakfast in this self same layby. It's good to build up a little of ones own history in another country, isn't it.
Auxerre.
The municipal site at Auxerre. I talked for a very long time with a recently widowed Jewish chap. Somewhat troubled, he said he was a former professor of mathematics who lives in Israel, but keeps his (VW) T2 in his native Holland and brings it out for long summer holidays. I do very much hope he's OK. He returned to his van where, despite failing eyesight, he read from the Talmud for hours on end including through much of the night. We eventually said goodbye and he asked me not to wake him when we left because he always slept late in the morning.
Reality strikes - the Dartford Crossing, or not, depending on the queues.
