Sometimes people ask me how I manage to remember so much about a holiday. Quite simply I couldn't bear not to remember a lot, hence a small amount of note-taking, lots of map-highlighting and large numbers of photographs (which I really don't want to look at just once or twice and then lose in a drawer). By 031105 I was pretty sure I'd finished this tale, but every so often I'll remember something else and add it (in this colour).

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 Tuesday 30 August: - 382 miles

 To Dover > Dunkerque, Mont Noir (30 miles E of St. Omer)

I'll keep this day brief, but might you please bear in mind that all of this is essentially a diary, (or, hell, even a blog of sorts). Not absolutely everything included in it will necessarily be totally fascinating to every reader. Similarly the choice of photographs is based on what's significant to us and not necessarily the best photography (you'll notice that).

Also, although I don't know why it is, less eventful days can sometimes produce more writing.

Skip straight to France? (But what if you miss something?).

Due mainly to my overexcitement I'd only gone to bed at 2am. The alarm was set for 6am. For reasons we will never know, Jo didn't get up until 6.30 and we left home 30mins down on schedule. And stopped in Staffordshire for a veggie breakfast (which Jo got at a reduced rate because the cashier failed to see the mushrooms hidden underneath two very oily fried eggs which I hadn't wanted anyway).

We took the toll road around Birmingham and were charged at car, not commercial, rate. The van overheated twice and we lost more time. On the M25 we went clockwise (it's 17 miles shorter), got badly stuck in traffic and lost an hour, I guess. The radio was telling us that had we gone anticlockwise we'd have been stuck for three hours! The height of the Dartford Bridge caused Jo some suffering (but she survived it).

We've an unusually reliable fuel gauge and, without telling Jo, I was fairly confidently running on fumes for much of that last stretch down to Dover. In May however, we'd had difficulty finding fuel around Dunkerque, so once in Dover town I stopped for two gallons. As we reached the very last check-in point the young woman there said that she was so sorry, but the last call for the 14.45 crossing had just come over her radio. They're very polite, those Norfolk Line people.

As we came back out of the port the temperature was 24° and that's quite enough for me. We dossed around until 4pm waiting to be allowed back in for a 5pm ferry. I slept a little. We went back through customs (where in the cabin there was a poster to help identify naughty mushrooms), and we joined the queue of mainly Brit pensioners in motorhomes, the occupants looking so very similar in their matching specs and yachting caps. Most of their vehicles had GPS navigation, but I was encouraged to see a few retro-types poring over maps. Hoping to be revitalised I scoffed a few Dextrosol tablets which I'd found in the glove compartment.

Our Norfolk Line ticket collector said that she and her husband have a T3 (VW camper, like ours but), with a lifting roof and "a potty which my husband won't use".

You might be wondering why we sailed from Dover to Dunkerque - the plain answer is that at the time we booked it it was cheaper then any other Channel crossing, £88 return which is pretty good for a vehicle the size of ours. Several months after we'd paid, another company introduced much lower fares, but they all enjoy surcharging us for having a high roof (2.6m). They line us up with motorhomes and commercial vans, but once on the ferry they have us park on the same deck as the cars. The crossing takes about 1hr 45mins. It's frustrating to see that those 45mins equate with the difference between landing at Calais, or sea-trudging along to Dunkerque.

Shortly after landing I phoned ahead to the campsite. Our Alan Rodgers book is 3 years old now, but on this trip there was only one site for which we looked in vain (near to Briançon and it had completely disappeared). Some folks'll tell you that in France you don't need campsite guides, but out of season and in the way we do things, a book does save a lot of time. Our other guide is the (free at their listed sites), Camping Qualité map.

Experienced travellers in France as we now are (ho-ho), we weren't particularly concerned about having to find a campsite in the dark in an unlit hamlet on a hilltop next to nowhere much and at 9.35pm we rolled onto a good one at Mont Noir near Bailleul (yes, exactly, nowhere much). I addressed the man who walked across from his house and into reception as Monsieur, but rapidly changed that after she turned to face me from behind the desk. (Well, my night vision isn't wonderful and I was very tired and she did have austerely short un-dyed grey hair). Her husband showed us to our plot and cheerfully pointed out the electricity and water, "but no whisky". I wondered how many times he'd cracked that one, translated for Jo and despite our tiredness, as respectful foreigners we dutifully laughed.

Listening to a very prolonged thunder-like rumblings, we got settled in. We sensed no imminent thundery conditions, but we were in Flanders and Ypres was just a little way down the road.

Slightly eerie, it really was.

No rain came.

A Belgian DJ was burbling more Oogly-Boogly than we could tolerate so I switched off and enjoyed instead that odd but special awareness that 14hrs earlier we'd been only 75 miles south of the Scottish border.

Settling in had taken rather longer than usual. Up in the roof and on its way to my sister near Turin was her pc and printer, all in original packaging, surprisingly heavy and taking up a lot of space, and in the wardrobe were six enormous dictionaries.

We'd forgotten to pack our outside chairs, nail clippers and a washing up bowl.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

 Wednesday 31 August

 Mont Noir (St Omer) to Bourg en Bresse, (Matafelon) - 455 miles

A long haul on a very hot day during which we saw three pea-sized clouds. We took the autoroute all the way to Le Bourg en Bresse and stopped only for meals (and two more engine overheating breaks). The van was going so very well and faster and easier than ever, which is probably why I thrashed it pretty soundly, but never once did I fail to appreciate the absence of gearstick rattle and other associated howlings, nor the need in fifth to keep my left knee jammed against the gearknob. One of the four settings on my very clever hearing aids is for driving-the-van-at-70mph-into-a-headwind, but after day one I never used that setting. There was no need.

Using autoroutes, however good the scenery (and for much of this day it was uninteresting), is the dullest way to travel through France and should probably always be avoided, unless one wants to arrive somewhere quickly. And we did.

But all one can expect on the autoroute is to make progress and to concentrate on......,

Not very much really:

• trying not to count Norbert Dentressangle's lorries,
• spotting vehicles which due to stops at services might several times have overtaken us and
• placing empty bets on the amount due at the next tollbooth.

	On canals over which we passed we did see a couple of huge wallowing barges crossing the country in that almost forgotten way and sometimes vast silhouetted grain silos would be mistaken for vast silhouetted churches, or vice versa.       This narrow boat though is crossing the English Channel. Click the image now, or read a little more about it later in this tale. Twice we saw British removal vans helping lucky families to start new lives.

Our van wasn't coping too well with hour after hour of high 70s on this very warm day. About mid-afternoon during an overheating break I took off the two plastic grilles and found low down on the radiator on the left side of the vehicle a big sort-of sender unit switch-thing. I pulled off the connectors and was a bit shaken to see that one of the spade terminals had been so badly corroded that it broke off.

In fact,

"It come off in me 'and, it did!".

And after that the electric fan didn't work.

Bad news, you might say.

And you'd be right.

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By the time we arrived at the campsite we'd spent €95 (half of what we'd somehow brought back from May's trip minus a little change left inside the oik's hat which lives at the bottom of the gear stick), on the first night's campsite and on autoroute tolls.

On this, our first full day, we'd already started to turn brown and in the north-south valley where the campsite is located we were very glad to be in the shade at last.

We chose a pitch at the water's edge and watched the setting sun pinking the limestone cliffs where they broke through the woodland opposite.

A bluetit was picking through the plot-dividing hedge. After a while out came mosquitoes, just a few, and swallows and martins skimmed the lake, the level of which was considerably higher than on our previous visits.

There was driftwood in the goalposts' nets and now the pontoon along which last year I'd strolled was attached to an island 30m offshore.

>> I was so enthused by our return to the campsite at Matafelon that, (using a wonderful little tripod given to me by the inestimable John Bassinder), I was trying to capture the reflected lights of the village across the lake.