April 2010
Monthly Archive
Monthly Archive
We woke up stiff from sleeping upright and a little cold, and headed for the town of Montreuil-Sur-Mer, a walled town near Boulogne. After a big breakfast we had a stroll around, but our very outdated Rough Guide had the wrong times for the opening of the Abbey, so we couldn’t go into the museum. We settled for a wander round the ramparts and the old town.
We got to Calais in time to catch an earlier ferry and thanked our lucky stars that we were on P&O. SeaFrance were on strike and chaos was starting to slowly set in while cars backed up and people tried to re-book with other companies. Back on British soil, the disorder at the French port seemed like nothing at all. Dover was one big traffic jam, Operation Stack was in force and they were using the A20 as a lorry park, while they diverted the normal traffic off the motorway to god knows where. When we booked the ferry, we picked a random date, and we hadn’t realised it was Good Friday. We’ll check better next year!
We got to the Cotwolds and Geoff’s family some hours later.
Judith 03 Apr 2010 | : Boring stuff, France
We played a quick April Fool prank on a friend (who shall remain nameless) and then loaded up the van, said our final farewells to the neighbours and set off with heavy hearts. The sky was obviously fantastic until the border, but 100km into France it started to rain. As we got closer to Millau there was hail, so we didn’t even stop. By the time we got to the Auvergne region the sun was shining, so we picked a town at random and got off the motorway for a break. The town we had chosen was St Flour, which is perched on a rock. Ironically, the ‘rock’ is made of basalt, so we got a sense of home as we wandered around looking at the houses perched on the edge of a cliff made of columns.
After that it was a long slog to Abbeville, where we arrived at 2.30am to sleep in the front seats of the van in a motorway service station.