Friday 28th February 2020 to Thursday 5th March 2020
Up early and travelling north through Spain to Burgos
An Osborne Bull somewhere in the middle of Spain
The weather was fine and we made good time to Burgos
Parked up at Burgos it was cold and after Portugal’s sunshine I’m just not used to it 🙁
Saturday it was raining so we skipped the planned stopover in Biarritz and headed straight for Bordeaux; BX to the locals. It was cold & wet.
Sunday morning rainbow over Bordeaux
After a quiet night parked up at the Vignobles vinyard in Yvrac we set off for a campsite in Tours but the weather was so wet we decided to give there a miss and head for our next planned stop at Dreux.
50 or so miles before Dreux it started to snow and the forecast was for travel disruption with thunder & lightening thrown in. Brilliant.
Snow!!!!!
As the campsite near Dreux was in the middle of the French countryside and I had no idea what the site access would be like we decided to go straight to Calais.
Now you would think being on a toll road a hundred or so miles from the Paris Péripérique and heading for Calais it’d all be plain sailing but when you combine Doris with France things are never simple.
I thought we’d just go north on the Péripérique then hookup with a motorway going towards the north French coast. What could be simpler?
By the time we hit the Péripérique the weather was shocking and the jams were endless. I was a little alarmed when we started to pass through some of Paris’ less salubrious suburbs.
France has some beautiful and very well maintained roads but none of them appear to be in Paris.
When we were kids my Grandparents used to live in Blackpool and when we used to visit them my Dad use to give the first of us to see the Blackpool tower a sixpence. As we got further into Paris I joked to Julie, “First person to see the Eiffel Tower gets a sixpence”. About 10 seconds later the Eiffel Tower emerged out of the rain! Fuck me Doris :-O
Hours and hours later we finally arrived at Cite d’Europe looking forward to parking up and eating.
Fuckin’ great, they’d closed the motorhome aire in December due to agro with migrants 🙁
Then I discovered none of the 24/7 fuel pumps at Cite d’Europe were working either so running on reserve we headed for the ferry terminal. If someone had told me as we set off from Bordeaux this morning that we’d hit a snow blizzard then catch the night ferry to Dover tonight all after seeing the Eiffel Tower I would have thought them mad.
Back in England we then discovered the M20 was closed in two places and no one had bothered to keep the diversion signs up. Brilliant.
Google maps managed to guide us around the back roads of Kent but I have to say the back roads in Kent are far worse than anything you’d come across in Portugal oe Spain. What a shithole Britain has become.
We got home around 3am, about 20 hours after we set off from Bordeaux.
Nelly parked up in the rain in Church Road.
Being home until October I thought I’d keep myself busy so on Monday night I popped in to see a meeting of the local Extinction Rebellion branch. Walking into town I was a little concerned I’d be the oldest person there but no I wasn’t the oldest and I think their average age must be in the late 50s. And they are very middle class.
Various worthy topics were discussed and a lady showed a tabard she had made for when she was handing out leaflets. While they were discussing counselling for people arrest at events I realised I was probably the only person there who’d ever been arrested!
As the meeting drew on this woman kept waving her hands about and I wondered if she had some unique form of Tourettes then I twigged, she was actually doing Jazz Hands!!!
Once the meeting ended I left pretty sharpish but on the walk home I decided I’d go to their next meeting. Maybe I could teach the lady with Jazz Hands how to get arrested and they council teach me how to make a tabard 😀
Reigate’s Priory Park, frosty in the mornings then raining all day 🙁
I’ve been home 4 days now and I am sick of the wet weather. I want to go back to Portugal.