Leaving Chamonix and heading down to The Long Unwinding Road, which is  La Route Napoléon 

 

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Trying not to swagger I walked back to Jo in the car park. (I'd have run, but my knees still had altitude-rubber inside them).

At 2.30pm we were away and into our next shot of wonderful scenery. More mountains,  massive limestone scenery, rolling plateaux, long climbs, deep valleys.

 

 

 

 

 

Every morning, or the evening before a travelling day, I'd plot out our route with a highlighter pen. It was then up to Jo to interpret it. And a damn fine job she did too. <--- Did you think we had a split screen?  

 

At Flumet we were diverted onto a minor road which wiggled amusingly through old natural woodland and rolled up and down steep valley sides. On one descent we were given, and  returned, an enormous wave from a white VW T3 camper, (part registration EXI), which was heading north. (I later found out that three weeks earlier a very similarly described van had been stolen from Northern Ireland, but this couple were far too happy to be thieves).

On the last hairpinned descent before Ugine we came upon a slow moving queue of traffic. At the front was the Bay Window camper from Chamonix. Its driver had already seen us in his mirror and huge waves were exchanged as we, relatively speaking, shot past. 

Albertville was mainly modern and very smart. 

As we sat late-lunching in a chill-out layby the Bay Window went past. It seemed perfectly healthy - just slow.

We found ourselves often running parallel to, or crossing, very new-looking concrete troughs as big as canals. The flow on them was minimal and evaporation must have been enormous. They were mostly too shallow to take even a kayak and were there to provide irrigation for crops, (crops which otherwise would have been planted somewhere much less hot and dry - good old EU, do I hear you say?).

 

 My knowledge of the names and locations of French regions and départements is very poor and, in fact, I am irked by the tendency for Brits to talk loudly, about what a splendid time they had in the Auvergne, etc. If they'd say the name of a nearby town or mountain range I might understand better where and what they were talking about. Ignorance is a terrible thing, isn't it! However, I think I'm right in saying that we'd left Haute Savoie behind and were now in Savoie.

Are you sufficiently ancient to have listened to Radio Luxembourg in the 70s? Do you remember the advertisements for skiing holidays in Val d'Isère?  

 

 

 

 

We spun down the route nationale along the broad Isère valley surrounded by absolutely marvellous prehistoric scenery. Very high limestone scarps, long valley-side cliffs with primitive woodland, (scrub willow, birch, the odd pine), filled every non-vertical free space.

 

 

 

 

Though the area was in parts industrialised it was easy to squint out the modernity and envisage yer primitive man hunting, fishing and dossing in the sun. 

 

In France and Switzerland there seemed to me to be many more frequent variations in speed limits than the regular 30, 40 and 50mph we find in the UK. Even when I took off my sunglasses it was often very difficult in the brilliant sunshine to see into the shade of the "binnacle" and read the kilometre speed we were doing.  I half resolved to do something about it, (like buy some tippexy stuff and put white dots where the kph lined up with the mph). 

Never did though.

 

All the time we'd been travelling south from Chamonix I'd been noticing the mixture of colours in the woodland. It looked as if autumn was on its way, and undoubtedly it was, but becaue we were going south I thought that evidence of autumn should have been decreasing.

Up to a certain height above a valley floor all was green, then browns appeared and eventually every tree higher up the slope, where there was less water and probably less soil, had brown leaves. France had had severe droughts and heat waves had killed thousands of people this summer.

 

At rush hour running into and around Grenoble we followed a strange vehicle: a Peugeot 306 towing a Maillet Randocar.

How the "caravan" and car are connected, or cope with hump-backed bridges, I don't know, but it ends up as a six-wheel camper-vannish thing. Last year on a French caravanning web site someone was offering to give his away.

Cliquez ici pour voir la photo en grand format

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As is quite often the case we'd started the day with little idea of where we'd end up. ("Which is nice"). At Vizille, just south of Grenoble we found this site. We liked it a lot. You'll be wondering why I didn't edit out the scruffy Peugeot? So am I.  

 

Since leaving Grenoble we'd been on RN85, La Route Napoléon. My knowledge of M. Bonaparte was restricted to the facts that he retreated from Moscow and was exiled on Elba. 

 

I've since found out this:

Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been exiled on the Island of Elba in 1814, decided to return to the forefront of French political life. 

A year later, on 1st March, he disembarked at Golfe Juan and set off, accompanied by a handful of his followers, to recover his title. He chose to reach Lyons over the mountains, so as to avoid meeting resistance in royalist towns. 

The Route Napoléon is the stretch linking Golfe Juan to Grenoble, via Grasse, Digne-les-Bains and Gap. He covered 324 km in 6 days and on 20 March reached the Tuileries, as planned.

 

 

The campsite at Vizille was just so very good, though it's hard to explain why -

 

I'm sure the element of pleasant surprise has something to do with it. 

The only things we already knew about this site were:

It was probably there, 

(because there was a teepee / black conical symbol on our 2002 road atlas), 

and that, in mid-September, it was possibly open.

 

I think that when a plan, which is really no plan at all, comes together in this way it makes a very good campsite seem even better.

 

 

A roof-tent which shut down into a roofbox fitted on top of a Citroen Berlingo caught my eye. Very neat.

 

It was getting dark by about 8pm. 

Folk sometimes ask us what we do in the evenings. Well, if we're stopping on the site, and we generally do, the first answer is:

followed by:

 

And we do find often that we can do several of these things at the same time.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

 

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