Skip to main content

France 2019

Here we go again...

We are off to France and once there, Corsica




Yes, Corsica is the plan and to make it more interesting, we booked the ferry from Nice for this coming Friday afternoon using aferry.com who interestingly are based in Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire. I spent many weeks living there on a caravan site whilst working at the JET project at Culham. I stopped doing that the morning after "the great hurricane" of 1987 after my awning was wrecked. Fortunately I had been working all night during the storm. Had I been inside my little touring caravan I think I would have been reduced to a nervous wreck.

The drive from home to Le Shuttle is 240 miles and it takes about five hours. Sunday morning is a good time to start and we arrived early and jumped onto a train an hour before the booked time. There was time for a swift coffee "on the back". Note the nicely varnished drop-down table not yet deployed.

On the train there are only two heights, lower or higher than 1.8m so we were in the higher lane and pulled up behind a Swiss couple in a Santana. Whilst it has some considerable similarity to a Defender, I believe these are significantly different and whilst the Santana allegedly offers some comfort, flexible power and a little space at the front, the Defender, erm doesn't.




We were off the train and into our much frequented site just east of Boulogne within 30mins. We've been here many times and its familiarity is comforting. This is especially so as there are three long-term summer residents - a lady from the Netherlands in here caravan, a Belgian man in his tent and "Gypsy Lady", so named as she lives in a traditional wooden caravan.  "C'est agréable de te revoir"

It's a great place to overnight and we were lucky as the weather had cleared-up and it was summer!
(280 miles from home.)



Day two has been a 215 mile, non-motorway drive towards Dijon. The weather is warm and dry and it has been enjoyable except for a problem with the newly fitted overdrive. This has been jumping out of non-engagement and it got worse through the day. Eventually I left it engaged which is OK except for very slightly difficult hill starts (due to higher gearing).

The newly discovered "French Passion" (ahem), is going to be great, if this night's stop is anything to go by. This is a network of free overnight stops, provided by farmers and growers. We are at a farm in a small hamlet, next to a barn on a lovely patch of grass. 


That's me sorting the overdrive linkage which had unwound a little. I think that will fix it.
Look what's in the barn!! A 1966 series 2 (109" I imagine). Guess what the Farmer and I have been talking about. 😀












Labels

Labels:

Comments

Phil said…
Oh wow! Have a great trip!! It won't be raining over there! Px
13 June 2019 at 12:44
Tim said…
Thanks Phil. Last minute prep then we'll be off!
15 June 2019 at 18:56
Charlie said…
Lovely stuff and great you have already made a Landy friend ��
17 June 2019 at 18:39
Nick G4FAL said…
New restoration project?
19 June 2019 at 22:37
Tim said…
He's not for parting. Maybe he's heard that people are starting to look at the little Series vehicles as candidates for electric propulsion conversions. Coming sooner than one might expect apparently.
20 June 2019 at 16:43
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On y va

Hooray. We are off. The ferry was booked a few weeks ago and the pressure was then on to get all sorts of jobs finished on the house and Landy. Major cosmetic work was to cover the grey front doors with paint that matches the rest of the vehicle. On the engine a coolant leak had developed behind the water pump and so the P gasket and adjacent core plug were renewed. Also a cheapy head unit from those Chinese people replaced the old Sony fm radio. Now we have opened up the wonders of Car Play and all that comes with it. Finally the 9th gen iPad with WiFi became a 9th gen iPad with WiFi and ‘cellular’. This means we can use OsmAnd Maps which need no data and get their gps position off the ‘cellular’ chip in the iPad. More on this useful map in subsequent posts. We headed towards Portsmouth for a mid morning ferry via our old neighbours in S-I-V. There we had a great few hours updating each about our families and then proceeded to save the NHS, the country and the world too. I mean why no...
Post a Comment
Read more

Onwards

You can’t visit a classic car enthusiast without admiring their car and we got our timing right, as it was the monthly club meet on Sunday. This was held at the Hippodrome in Maisons Laffitte, so it was just up the road. The definition of ‘classic’ here is 30 years and so many of the vehicles there looked very familiar to us 😳. TR5 and TR6, MGB, RR, BMW, Maserati, of course the Jensen Interceptor that our host drives, 2CV, Caterham 7, a beautiful Austin Healy 3 litre and then this… This is identical to mine, a Fiat 850 Sport Coupé, that I owned from 1978-81. Seeing it, brought back memories of welding, brazing, stripped driveshaft splines, clutch on the M1 and many miles of amazing touring. We drove around France on a camping road trip for all of September 1978 and the following year did the Ardennes for a month too. Here’s Nige’s Jensen… Maisons Laffitte is a very nice area to the west of Paris centre. The mansion is now owned by a trust I think and is a beautiful building. All we ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

Towards Savoie

We stayed on the motorway, which for us is unusual in France but we have experienced the traffic calming in the towns and villages. A direct and fast journey was planned and achieved, with  a  nice morning stop and appropriate accompaniments. We arrived at Saint-Jean-de-Chevelu which is a little west of Lac du Bourget, the huge lake which has Aix- les-Bains on its eastern shore. We went to a previously researched campsite, Camping des lacs. This is a lovely spot of about 100 places for a mix of tents, camper-vans and smaller motor homes. There are also cabins and some that were a bit like shepherd’s huts. It’s situated next to two small lakes (surprise!) and there’s a ring of small mountains around. These would have been peri-glacial lakes 🥸 back at the last ice age and have now become a joint playground and eco place. You can swim, fish and respect ‘nature’ here but need to get in the right part at the right time to do what’s allowed. A lady pecheur told us of carp and ...
Post a Comment
Read more