Westward Ho……

On the 15^th we checked out of, perhaps, the best campsite so far.  The ‘best’ label may only be based on the fact that we could get wi-fi while sitting in Eileen; we didn’t have to go and sit in a tent, or a reception office, or a chilly room, or even the local McDonalds.  It was so nice just to pay for 24 hours and be able to check the news and sport and blog whenever we fancied. First task en route was to fill up on gas and diesel; this was the first time since leaving England that we had bought some gas and it turned out we had only used about 2/3^rd of the tank. And this brings me to another aside.

We have had a request from Mr Johnson for more technical details about our trip. “We all want to know how the gas system is working, have you been able to refill it OK?  What about MPG of the van? How’s the campsite electric (polarity) and Wi-Fi? How often do you have to empty the toilet tank? …. all that sort of stuff!”  Now, I’m really surprised by the need for answers to all these questions, especially as I have no idea, I’m too busy keeping Eileen clean and am always on ‘stow-it-away’ duty, so I will have to get Rodney to dictate…..

“The gas system is working very well and the fill-up wasn’t too difficult”    (a rather pretty lady did come over to help him…).

“We’re probably doing about 33miles per gallon or 11.5km per litre, maybe better than that”    (I’m happy with that, more money available for cheese and tarts).

“So far, we’ve only had one campsite that seemed to be all reversed polarity, so we didn’t bother with power that night”    (no worries).

“ Wi-fi really has been a bit painful, but we should be ok now”    (as I said above, we’ve really had to put time, thought and money into obtaining internet access, which is strange after you’re so used to having it at your fingertips all the time at home.  We’ve tried Orange stores to get something going, but it took until yesterday to sort something out.  Julia and Kevin and their 17 year old French fluent daughter Hannah (thank you so much Hannah) took us to their local Orange store in St Gilles-Croix-de-Vie.  So now we’ve purchased a dongle and have 30 days, or a maximum of 2Gb, and an extra 100mb for the first 15 days.  Hopefully that’s plenty for our needs. We’re not sure how we’ll go with a recharge, especially as everything is in French, but we’ll deal with that in a few week’s time. So our only problem from now on, should be making sure we can find areas with good mobile reception).

“We’re both trying not to use the toilet too much, apart from those middle-of-the-night dashes, so the toilet cassette has probably only been emptied about 5 times.  The grey water waste has been more often than that, about every 3 or 4 days”  (he’s doing a lovely job and I’m supporting him all the way and if anyone wants a photo of these happy tasks, I’ll be happy to oblige).

As for the driving…. we have only had a couple of incidences of being on the wrong side of the road, both times because there was no one around and I had my head down buried in a map.

So, when we drove out of Ballan-Mire, on the correct side of the road, we headed for Langais which turned out to be another small town with a chateau, but no action.  We only spotted about 5 people in town, all of whom were dashing somewhere with one or more baguettes under their arms.  We drove further west along the banks of the Loire to Saumur as the clouds began to build again and then turn grey.

 

 

As we parked Eileen below the huge castle-like chateau the rain came down.  So we found the lovely Le Grand Bleu restaurant and tucked in to a 2 course meal du jour.  As we finished the meal the sun came out and we spent an hour strolling around the lovely town.  For some reason, we were both reminded of Cheltenham in England, it had that sort of feel about it, but with a castle.

 

 

As it was still only mid afternoon we decided to put a few more miles under our belt and get a bit further west before camping for the night, so we drove to Cholet and checked in to the, very empty, Camping Le Lac de Ribau.  This was the first campsite with reversed polarity, so we ate pate and salad, read our books and snuggled down to an early night.

On Wednesday we drove through St Herbiers, La Roche-sur-Yon, Aizenay, Coex and on to St Gilles-Croix-de-Vie.  We found Julia, Kevin and Hannah sitting in the sunshine on the front balcony of their house in the village of La Fenouiller.   So, true to form, we started Thursday with three loads of washing and then we all went shopping and on to our, previously mentioned, successful visit to the local Orange telecommunications store. We enjoyed another home cooked meal and good conversation for a second evening.

Today, Julia Rodney and I went for a very windy walk around the headland from St Gilles to Sion-Sur-L’Ocean for a hot chocolate and then the five of us went down to the Grand Plage for lunch.  After lunch we bought two huge bags of chi chis, the French version of churros, one with a cone of warm nutella to dip in to.  Tres delicious!

 

 

Julia and Hannah have now flown back to their home in Holland and Rodney and Kevin are trying to solve the financial problems of the world from the sofa.  We’ve decided to stay on a couple more days and get Eileen cleaned, inside and out, fix Rodney’s bicycle puncture and catch up on some paperwork. So we are now about as far west as we can go and our next move will be to head south.