Skip to Calais                Skip to Switzerland

A campervan girl? What, like a drippy hippy chick with long hair, flat sandals, (or flat hair and long sandals), and chaos all around? 

Whatever your idea of an imagined campervan girl might be, it probably isn't much like Jo, but I think my point is that she and I get on so very, very well, (in fact no less well than usual), even when we're constantly together for three weeks and mostly in a relatively small space.

Jo's brother, Dave, was the chauffeur, a privileged role indeed.

So as not to crease her dress, (and because one can), Jo stood up throughout the short journey from her parent's home to The Hampson House Hotel outside Lancaster. 

It had rained nearly all day, but the sun came out brightly, (and just as I'd predicted), half an hour before the ceremony took place.

 To reach either of the below, Family and Friends should e-mail me for the necessary urls. 

Arrivals                              The Ceremony, etc

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 The 'Moon Journey. 

Skip to Calais                Skip to Switzerland

These are our honeymoon travels and they include what's of interest to us, not that we mind you taking a peek, of course, otherwise it wouldn't be ont' tinternet, would it!

Warwick, Dover - Calais, Pontarlier, 

Interlaken, Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, Interlaken.

"We'll be in Switzerland in two days time", said I, (with a minimum of modesty).

We pottered into the centre of Warwick. I'd last visited Warwick in the mid-60's on a school trip from Gloucestershire and been frightened by the dungeon in the castle. The town has some very fine old buildings, as well as the castle, and many shops filled with expensive things you don't need. We bought enormous Chinese take-aways.

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Monday 080903: Feeling it necessary to leave plenty of time for M25 delays, we were off fairly early onto the motorway where within 5mins the water warning light came on. This had been happening infrequently for 3 years so I wasn't too concerned. The level wasn't obviously low and we soon set off again without further problems. 

After relatively minor delays we arrived in Dover two and a half hours early and  set off to find some boxer shorts for me, the only things we'd forgotten to pack. We had an excellent lunch at La Scala, which was run by a heavily accented and real Italian. Unlike many ports Dover is a smart town and has a huge castle on the hill above. I'd passed through Dover only once before on the, as was, British Rail-Sealink ferry.

(I was sixteen years old and on a school-arranged visit to a family in Lyon. I clearly remember that we arrived about midnight at the station in Lyon. We looked out onto the platform at the families who'd come to collect us and an astonishingly unattractive woman and her gawky young daughter stood out from the crowd. Hell, look at those freaks, I thought, Who's going to be get them!?!

You guessed! And I guess I'd guessed too. Sometimes you just know, don't you? And I had a miserable time, not helped by a nasty reaction to an emergency smallpox inoculation, nor by my host family's almost complete lack of understanding of my vegetarian diet. 

The only high point I remember was going from the family's tower block apartment to a local youth club's disco and listening to the Stones' live, (Ya-Yas), version of Midnight Rambler blasting out. (Well, there was another highpoint - drinking a well-advised triple brandy to combat very effectively the extremely rough seas on the return crossing).

Our 2003 crossing to Calais took an hour and a half, which seems odd when you think that it's only 20 or so miles straight across, but the ferry crosses the Channel and then crawls up the French coast. (It's also a bit odd that we northern bumpkins were surprised to find that mid-Channel we could see from one side to the other).

I'd thought about going directly to the municipal campsite in Calais, but we didn't. In the Alan Rogers' book Jo found a campsite two hours away from Calais. We re-fuelled and I phoned the site. In my enthusiasm for low-priced diesel I put in so much that it was leaking out of both the forward tanks and the main one, so to get the level down more quickly I just drove faster and we zoomed down the A26 towards Reims. 

It was a good site, well treed and pooled, (and particularly attractive, I'm sure, to those who enjoy deceiving fish.

Here, fishy-wishy, have some food while I just spike the roof of your mouth, drag you out of your native habitat and drown you in oxygen. 

The site was occupied mainly by Brits, including a particularly silly old Englishman who kept hugging and squeezing the exceedingly tolerant French proprietress. (She did say, in very good English, that if it weren't for the Brits she'd have already closed down for the season, but that still seems like no good reason to have put up with him). 

We listened to the Nostalgique radio channel - lots of British and American music amongst the French pop-drivel. (I will admit to liking the music of Jacques Brel though - there's hardly a squeeze box to be heard anywhere amongst it!). 

Jo didn't feel as if we were abroad yet. I suppose that's because we'd been  cocooned in the van whilst whizzing down autoroutes which keep one so very distant from the outside world.

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Tuesday 090903: I woke up very early, (what with the bites and a miserable backache), got up and wriggled about while trying to sleep in the front passenger seat. Variations on this dismal performance continued for many mornings. 

I'd plotted the route with ViaMichelin who'd quoted six hours by autoroute from Dover to the Swiss border, (well, Pontarlier which is certainly near enough), and £21 in tolls. After an unrushed start, (like all of ours), we pressed on steadily, but I wasn't doing the 130kph autoroute speed limit. (I now reckon that for our t25's journeys I need to add about 50% to ViaMichelin's autoroute times). 

After the dull weather and immensely dull countryside through which we'd so far travelled, the scenery was very slowly improving and by mid afternoon was definitely showing promise as we approached the northern end of the Jura range. 

The town of Besancon has a hugely impressive cliff-top castle and wigglesome main roads. We certainly felt by that stage that we were getting somewhere. 

That evening, uncertain of finding campsites just over the Swiss border, we drove into the centre of Pontarlier with its tower and single-lane archway beneath, and found a terraced hillside site on the outskirts. I remember saying to Jo that the lad at reception probably wasn't bright enough to be the village idiot. 

Low cloud came down even further and it rained.

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Wednesday 100903: Up to the Swiss border we went and were waved through by a lazy fat bloke in the French Customs post. I stopped and asked the lazy fat bloke about buying a Swiss motorway vignette. With a big thumb and a screech he indicated that we should bother the Swiss, not him. It had slipped my mind that, of course, there would be a Swiss post as well.

For months I'd been certain that we'd be searched by the Swiss, but we weren't. A smart and pleasant little uniformed chap in a most unmilitary beret sold us the vignette, (£20 p.a.) and on we went with the sun breaking through nicely. We changed from Michelin's 1cm:4km atlas to their 1cm:3km map, (which was in the back of the excellent Baedeker's Switzerland guide which Will had given to us as a wedding present). 

I remembered my teenage disappointment that one doesn't cross this western border and become immediately surrounded by vast snow-capped mountains. Mixed deciduous woodland and steep hills brought us down into wider, more open valleys and past several good looking campsites. A bare-headed vulture-like hawk kept alongside us for a while. 

In parts the road had been slipping away sideways leaving only flimsily fenced off single-lane stretches. 

Gentle alpine scenery continued with fine views down onto the, (interestingly named), Lac de Neuchatel. Through Neuchatel's narrow and twisting streets we went, gawping at its old and excellent mixture of French and Swiss vernacular architecture. 

Making the most of our motorway vignette we zoomed on mostly underneath Neuchatel, because those Swiss dudes can and will build tunnels almost anywhere. I presume they'd built these to preserve the town and to reduce traffic noise, because there are certainly no big hills around there. 

Switzerland became almost dull as we continued across wide flat valleys to Thun where visually things do start to pick up, although the weather wasn't doing.

Here's a rather weighty, (waity?), pictorial map of Interlaken and The Bernese Oberland, (but well worth a look, I suggest).

In Interlaken we followed plentiful campsite signs. At home all I'd prepared had been a list of sites' phone no's from the www. I remembered that the sites were mainly clustered on the northwest edge of the town. And so they were. 

We drove onto the first. 

It didn't feel right

Onto the second, The Lazy Rancho, which did. Had they not been sulking in the clouds, it would have had the best views of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, (EM&J).  

We are developing a theory that sites with stupid names are often the best, (like the Cala Go-Go in 2002 in St Cyprien). 

This site, like all those we visited, was 1/3 to 1/4 full. The trees, hedges and grass looked a little end-of-season, but it mattered not, and end-of-season is cheaper, of course. 

Anyway, Jo was jolly impressed when I booked us in in German. So was I, now I think back. 

I don't know enough of any foreign language to do other than get by. I can rarely say exactly what I want to say and have to swizzle it all around in me 'ead until I've found another way of getting close to what I mean. The site owner spoke good English of course, being involved in the Swiss tourist industry. His wife spoke flawless American. 

 

	A Swiss-style "awning" attached to a touring, (but long since rendered static), caravan. Better seen on the van to the right, (though they all had them), is the extra roof fitted to stop heavy snowfall from crushing the manufacturer's original. Note the large and fairly hideous gnome in our neighbour's "garden".

With the weather improving, but the EM&J still fairly well concealed, (later I even took photographs of the fairly well concealed versions), we walked over the ice-blue river, (well, over the bridge), and into the centre of Interlaken to look for a Swiss army knife for Jo's dad. 

We sat at a terrace cafe outside a hotel and scoffed ice-cream, drank the local Rugenbräu Spezial Bier and watched the world go by. By this stage I'd already taken 21 photographs. 

On the way "home" we each stuck a hand, (our own, of course), into the river's paralysingly cold, blue glacier water. 

In the evening it rained. We listened to DRS 3, a station which  displayed on the radio the artists' names and song titles while they were playing. 

The French government restricts, (still?) the proportion of imported music played on radio, but the Swiss seem not to be concerned about that, (old nonsense).

I had a new sliding door seal on board and fitted it successfully.

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Thursday 110903: It was raining, but I used to live in South Wales, so I do know the sort of locations to visit in wet weather. We drove up Lauterbrunnental to the Trummelbach waterfalls where I discovered something more than a bit frustrating: there was no film in my otherwise fairly clever camera, nor had there been any since the start of the holiday! Jo's camera, later reclaimed, had been left in the hotel by a rather drunken me.

Left: Somewhere near to the top.                 Right: Nowhere near to the bottom.  N.B: the folks on the balcony.

On increasingly snaky roads in increasingly heavy rain we drove as far up the valley as one can, then trundled back and up to Grindelwald, again as far as one can on the superbly windy roads. Swiss engineering is so good, so reliable that even on fairly minor roads one really can depend on corners maintaining a constant curve and not dumping you towards the verge, or an oncoming vehicle.

We parked outside a large hotel and despite the rain, (it was easing off), walked a short way through woodland and alps. [Alps / Alpen are really just high meadows. They were still full of wild, but tired, flowers. (Hey, you know that feeling?)].

All photographs and text, unless otherwise stated, are © Neil Gunn. 

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