04 - 20 JULY 2006.
The Auvergne, the Dordogne, the Pyrenees, Provence - ish, the Cevennes, Chamonix, the Jura.
Before Christmas(!) I'll fill out this tale with some more details of the route.
Apparently modesty does not forbid the author from:
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Outstanding. Your pictorials are always a great read/view. Some great pics and a good read - I'm taking the bus (for the 1st time) to France in mid Sept. Your site has got me even more excited. Beautiful, stunning, inspiring, interesting...wow! a great docu-drive-holiday. KamperChat |
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Fantastic! I've just seen the shots of the troglodyte villages. The Brickyard |
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Another eminently readable and fantastically
viewable epic. VW Busgoons |
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That was some tour. You must have enjoyed
yourselves. I know I did, just looking. And I am sure I got sunburn.
Thanks, really great. The quality of your photos is amazing especially the fireworks ones. Brilliant. I enjoyed that. Once again you have excelled yourself with your beautiful shots and your informative narrative. VW Club80-90 |
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Motorhomefacts |
| Recent Preparations for the Trip: | Big Highlights of the Trip: | |
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Had brakes checked |
The Puy de Dôme |
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Had minor coolant leak(s) located and stopped |
2 Stages of the The Tour de France | |
| Had gear linkage defect(s) put right | The Cévennes Day | |
| Bought a Tour de France magazine | Crest to Chamonix | |
| Found on the www a campsite in the Auvergne | 2 nights in Chamonix | |
| Printed off directions from Dunkerque to Clermont Ferrand | Chamonix to Troyes - The Jura Day | |
| Bought a 75 - 300mm lens (and hardly used it at all). |
The Photography:
It's quite possible that I brought back more than 1,500 photographs, but I took far more than that, deleted many before returning then, once I was able to see them on the pc, at least 400 more. Many opportunities were missed to capture images in passing. I wished I hadn't done this, but so that I could take so very many images they were mostly set at the lowest quality, then reduced to about 990 x 660 (or 1485), so that they fit fairly comfortably into a screen setting of 1024 x 768 pixels.
A few are very good, some are just plain bad, many have more atmosphere than quality (or else the atmosphere is the quality), and, because this is our record of our holiday, selections have been made on the basis of what we don't want to forget.
The camera? A Canon EOS 350D and, almost always, a 18 - 55mm lens.
The Tour Stages (The Pilgrimage):
Why a pilgrimage? I'd been avidly watching the Tour on TV since 1985, so it really was about time I saw it for real. Imagine my disappointment when on the first stage we'd planned to watch, even at 4pm on the day before the tour would arrive, we weren't able to get onto the Col de Marie Blanque because it was full up!, but the Col d'Aspin experience was quite fabulous, although many of the photographs were worse that inept. Those poor results gave us good reason to repeat the Tour experience on another excellent stage near Montélimar where this camera operator performed slightly better.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the
end?
To be stuck outside Montélimar
In my cycling shorts again.
(Sorry, Bob).
Day 1: Home > Dover-Dunquerque > Compiegne (south of Saint Quentin) - 545 miles
After much last minute juggling of our pre-booked ferry times (the Norfolkline folks are very understanding), about 8pm on Monday 3 July we hit the clutter-free M6 and not too long afterwards were travelling around Birmingham on that Australian-owned M6 toll road. (This and the Dartford Crossing are half-price at night). We took the A14 towards Kettering and down onto the M11, a route recommended by our friend, Bruce, who on the previous day had crossed to France. (He isn't a hairdresser but he owns an MGF and used to be a lorry driver. 10 days later he got Gatso'd while driving the MG around the Monaco Grand Prix circuit). The total distance via the A14 is about 20 miles more than the shortest, but one spends much less time on the M25. It's a really good road, but the A14 on that fine, still night was oddly smelly with a high pressure weather system prevented farming's and other industries' whiffs from moving much above ground level.
We snoozed for 2hrs at Bishop Stortford Services and running on fumes we arrived in Dover about 4am. I had to put in just enough diesel to get us safely to a French garage. And that was the first time the van let us down - the starter motor refused to turn, a trick which the van hadn't used on us since our last year's long hard drive home from Dover.
Attempts to free the starter by pushing and shoving the van whilst in gear achieved nothing and I didn't want to lie down on an oily forecourt and hit the starter with our peg-driving lump hammer, so we went for the bump-start option. And that's when they shot me. Well, it felt like that, I'm pretty sure. And there was no warning at all, just a horrible feeling as if a golf ball at an enormous speed had arrived in my right calf muscle. I hopped across the forecourt, tried another push, swapped places with Jo who, tiny woman that she is, managed enough of a shove for me to start the van.
On an out of the way car park we slept badly until 7am.
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Halte de Mainville, Ressons le Long, east of Compiègne, a site chosen because it was quite near to the autoroute and we were fed up with driving. Jo liked the site, but I could gladly never go back. A boring British bloke, a total fishing nut, who for many years had been stopping there for many weeks at a time told us that all the site's sewage drains into that pond (just look at the colour of it), and that the fish are in a wonderful condition. |
He also told us that next day the Tour de France was coming through Saint Quentin (about 50 miles north of us), but in fact it was the day afterwards. And anyway, Johnny Cash said, "San Quentin, I hate every inch of you", didn't he. "You've cut me and you scarred me through and through.........", so there was no way we were going to Saint Quentin.
When we'd finished booking in, the owner gave us a bag of dried bread for the ducks and geese.
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A Study of a Young Mallard
by Jo |
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Even after two weeks had gone by the right calf was still much larger than the left. Had I known I might have considered perhaps repeating the exercise, but with the left one. |
Chilled and | dozy. |
France's first moonshot fails to even get off the ground.
Day 2: Compiègne to Gannat (west of Vichy) - 318 miles
Breakfast in the Forest of Compiègne
with
my Buddha-buddy (a Father's Day present).
We'd turned in to avoid a long queue of traffic and I was immediately impressed by the French-ness of this village (Rethondes).
We won't be in any rush to return to Paris. ViaMichelin had warned of roadworks on the Boulevard Periphique ("BP" as shown on the matrix road signs), and there were diversions, big delays and, for me, some disappointment in that, not having reached the BP, I am unable to match Jo's feat of many years earlier when she had once driven a lwb transit minibus "through the middle of Paris".
If Paris were a clock, then Jo navigated us faultlessly from 1pm to 7pm as she interpreted directions from the excellent ViaMichelin. I say excellent, but, as we already knew, the journey times shown are very optimistic. Under seven hours was given for the 445 miles form Dunkerque to Clermont Ferrand, which at first glance doesn't seem unreasonable for an autoroute journey in a modern car, but with a few stops and a lengthy clog-up in Paris, much of it spent in fumey tunnels, we were on our third day before we reached Clermont Ferrand.
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White Light, White Heat. Off the autoroute hiding from both at a mid-afternoon aire stop. |
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A warning considered unnecessary in Britain. |
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Through the very centre of France, Farges Allichamps. I admire enormously the immodesty of French civil (and other) engineering. |
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Apres le deluge? Camping municipal "Le Mont Libre", Route de la Batisse, 03800 GANNAT. We chose this very good site near Vichy simply because it happened to be close to where we were getting tired and the thunder rain had become so heavy as to drop our speed down to about 30mph. |
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Mock-misery.
Real sky colour - no tricks.
"Leave me fuzzy", she said.
Sheet and fork lightening flashed throughout much of the night. I'm told that thunder banged, blasted and belly-rumbled along with it, but it hardly disturbed me at all.
Day 3: Gannat to Le Mont Dore - 63 miles
Too bright too early, you'd say? 
The first field of sunflowers on this trip.
I'd first noticed these odd mountains on a fine sunny day in 2004 as we'd travelled north up the autoroute to the east of them. Two years later this was our first view of the volcanoes of the Auvergne region. To the left the biggest, the Puy de Dome, is almost hidden in the cloud, but we hunted it down..........
