A bit further

Usually when you “go to France”, the weather rapidly improves on leaving the French coast. It’s often better as soon as you get to the other side of the ‘English’ Channel.

Late Spring of 2023 is not following the norm and the intense high pressure that has been close to the north of Britain for so long, is affecting the continental weather too. The cool, cloudy weather across the eastern side of the UK is spilling into northern France, so it is cool and cloudy here.

We ‘overnighted’ at a great site, https://www.chateau-gandspette.com/ where Julien in reception, had an interesting English accent and used some clichés such as “it’s been one of those days”.

With a little probing, I discovered that his mother is English and also that he worked for Kent County council, for a number of years. He ran one of their outdoor centres, this one was in France but he commuted daily, to Maidstone as they needed him in their office. He was an ‘essential car driver’ and so a vehicle was provided (or expensed), as was the daily return ticket on Le Shuttle. Is that madness?

The evening sun was lovely but it was cool in the wind.

First continental breakfast though, was duly disappointing, sitting under cloud and it was 10 degrees, so we continued south that day, in search of sunshine. 

It’s a lovely area consisting of rolling landscapes and big fields. The contrast with driving to Folkstone is enormous, with empty roads and beautiful smooth tarmac. Of course there’s an aire every few km., providing lots of opportunity to stop for a few minutes. There’s a lot more space, the new build houses seem bigger and more expensive than might be expected and this continued as we cruised towards Laon, not far from Reims (pronounced ‘Rance’, if you didn’t already know).

A guy approached me as we were having coffee on an aire. I thought he would be French but he had perfect English, even better than Julien’s and indeed he was English and his perfect accent was from Southend (pronounced ‘Saarfend’, if you didn’t already know).

Randomly, he asked if I had breakdown insurance and for a moment I went into full-on flap and panic mode, wondering what he had seen on the Landy to cause him to ask. He reassuringly explained that he used to bring an VW vehicle across from the UK but now it’s over 15 years old he can’t find anyone to cover it. Obviously ‘we’ are now about 27 years old but are happily covered by LV= Britannia Rescue. 

He was both curious and grateful to learn this and said thanks, getting back in the car with wife and mother (daughter and wife??) and was off to stay at their second home, not far from Laon.

We went to a wild west themed campsite which is just waking up for the season. It’s very well done with great timber cabin constructions, a saloon bar and big wagon train units for hire.

Our pitch was more mundane, ‘Indien Keys’, not far from the ‘Chûtes de Niagra’ sanitary block but closer to the farmed fish ponds which are home to many frogs. These make a deafening sound, on occasion, throughout the evening and night but didn’t trouble us. There are worse things in life.

Currently those worse things are the thunderstorms and rain in the alps. This is a snapshot of the recent lightening strikes a couple of evenings ago and the next screenshot is the cummulative rainfall predicted by the ECM model over the coming days.

We need to keep a watchful eye.