Peelies travels

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 ...

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...

We checked the forecast again and save for a few slightly ‘dodgy days’, it looks good; the drive to the Alps is ‘on’. We thus triggered a ‘maybe’ part of ‘The Plan’ and surprised our friends and very long term residents of a Parisian suburb, by asking if we could call in. Of course after about seven or eight years, one cannot ‘just call in’ and overnight hospitality was offered and we set the compass and timer to arrive a couple of days later. The river Seine gets awkward after flowing through Paris, well it’s fairly bendy there too and the trip towards Paris got tangled-up with the river a bit. However our OsmAnd map is detailed enough to show a ferry across at the edge of the village in which we planned to stay and we approached it with interest. There was no queue and no charge. Unlike the UK where there would have been at least a toll dating back to 1504 or some such time, collected by a family with the responsibility handed down through the generations, this is a free service prov...

You’ve either heard of it or you haven’t and we hadn’t. At the estuary of the Seine, opposite the port city of Le Havre, is this beautiful town. Of course I can look good in nice clothes and nearly everywhere looks good under blue skies. Yesterday Honfleur was dressed well and it looked great. Unfortunately for the seafarers, the harbour access was eventually blocked with Seine silt, save for a dredged channel that maintains access for small boats. Maybe it was the creation of Le Havre as a result that has meant Honfleur retains an olde worlde charm that wasn’t destroyed in WW2. We walked the 2+ miles from:the campsite to the Vieux Bassin and drank a throughly deserved Café Crème at La Maison Bleu , a café on the cobblestones where the waiter was one of those career guys who can just do it. He doesn’t carry any aids, save a tray and a cloth, with a card machine when he’s ready to take payments. When he came for our order he already had those from at least three tables and picked up two...

We’d taken the ferry as a change from the tunnel, as well as the route to Portsmouth giving us that chance to drop-in to SIV but it is slow! Le Shuttle is so quick to load and unload and although the Commodore Clipper is a very small ferry, we sat in line for ages, both before and during the check in and border process. Maybe the M1/25/20 drive isn’t such a bad option after all. That route has brought us here to Normandy and it’s full of things to do. We are going to spend a day at Honfleur which is across the Seine from Le Havre. One is a big port and the other a beautiful coastal town. We’ll concentrate on the beautiful bit. First though we need a place to stay as it’s already 7pm when we disembark (no queues or further checks here are needed to enter the EU). Just up the coast are a couple of places on Park4night. We drove past one in order to have a look. It’s a €10 fee to go through a security gate to a house but we think you need to ring a French number and we wonder about the pr...

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...