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 provided by some sort of river authority. We happily drove on and off within 5 minutes.
The Abbey at Jumièges is just below the village campsite and is one of the oldest Benedictine monasteries in Normandy. It might be constructed of limestone. It has a very intense white colour that’s almost marble in its appearance. The abbey dates from about 654 but I don’t know if any of those first parts are visible now. I doubt it but it seems to have been well established by the 11th century.
The campsite is affiliated with the two touring clubs in the UK and you can see this, as there were several vehicles with a UK plate. We are usually the only one. Of course the Landy generated some chat and an elderly couple came to see us to say that they too had a 110 (Puma) with Icarus roof but that it was getting too hard to handle and they were instead towing a small caravan.
Innocuously they enquired about our travels: “Have you been far?”, “yes” we said, “to Portugal, the Alps, Albania, Greece, Bosnia…”. Had we been over that hard road in the north of Albania? “You mean to Teth?”, “Yes”. “We have”.
Then they talked about retrofitting the seats if they decide to stop using their Landy altogether, happening to say that they can easily fit a third seat as “we ‘needed a minder when we crossed Libya”. Wow. They had shipped the 110 to Cape Town and driven home, in 2008, via Libya and on (somehow) to Jordan and Syria. Then in 2020, they got tangled up with Covid19 when they were in the USA, having shipped it to Savanna, Georgia!
So they had a story or two to relate.
The campsite shop sold cider which tasted good and encouraged us to lookup the producer. It comes from just across the river and we decided to pay them a call in the morning as we drove away. This required a different ferry back across, only a few miles from the other. Again there was no queue and we were soon across and at the cider place.
This is an innocuous looking business that grows its own fruit, presses, ferments and bottles it. We had a great time engaging in a discussion about bottling particularly and the control / minimisation of ‘giveaway’. All this with one guy whilst the other wrestled with a brand new SumUp till and reader. We were the first to use it and unfortunately for us, we ended up using cash!
Later we approached the west of Paris, crossed the river when we shouldn’t have and were welcomed by our friends, about 20 minutes late! A lot of catching-up was done that afternoon and evening.
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