Week 2

Week 2

Day 8 – Friday 16^th March 2018

Woke to some sunshine, upped camp and travelled the 50 miles to Aix-en-Provence (pronounced ex-en….) Stopped off at the small town of Lambesc which we saw just off the N7 and as luck would have it it was market day! I love French markets, they sell all kinds of rubbish and they always have a couple of stalls selling lovely smelly cheeses.

This market had the added bonus of an accordion player. I put €1 in his tin and went to take his photo at which point the cheeky fucker demanded €5 and gave me some sob story in French. I had a good mind to take my €1 back.

Lambesc has a big church with a bell tower and I thought it’d be a great place to take a picture from but the caretaker didn’t really agree and stomped off to get a sign in English to tell me to bugger off.

Doris guided us safely to our campsite in Aix and we then walked into town. Aix is a beautiful French town and we had a good walk around it but I’m missing the countryside and I’m missing the coast. Tomorrow we hit the Med and I’ll be getting my toes wet.

Day 9 – Saturday 17th March 2018

Lovely morning and we travelled to La Tour Fondue on the coast. After lunch we went to explore and we ended up on a French coast path. It started off just like any other coastal walk but soon we were on the beach and then climbing rocks while holding on a stainless steel hawser. I thought it was great fun, Julie less so.

The weather being good it was time to get Zippy off the back and have a go at riding in France. Roundabouts are going to need some work; in Nelly everyone stays out of my way, not so with Zippy.

Day 10 – Sunday 18th March 2018

Still sunny. Up early and sorting out the van. Julie’s knee was sore so I went by myself for another walk along the coast, beautiful. The lady in the reception tells me they have flamingos in the lagoons on the way into town. We must come back here sometime and stay for a few days.

We set off for Cannes. I want to see a bit of the countryside  so I programmed motorways out of Doris. Everything was great until we hit a section of the D98 with no barriers and sheer drops on Julie’s side. But we made it though. A while later we were directed onto the DN7. It was a bit torturous but Doris said it only went on for 12 miles! I think Julie was exhausted by the time we were made it to more relaxing roads; all that seat gripping can take it out of you. But there was worse to come, much worse.

Parc Belleview Camping gives its address as 67 Avenue Maurice Chevalier, 06150 Cannes, France so that was where Doris was taking us, right? Wrong.

Doris thought 67 Avenue Maurice Chevalier was up a small road lined with parked cars, round a 90° bend and down a muddy track leading to a dead end. Fuckin’ brilliant Doris.

As everyone whose every been up shit creek will know the secret to getting out is to stay calm and definitely not to panic but even I was more than a little concerned. I think the DN7 had softened me up. This was serious, very serious.

I stopped Nelly and had a walk further down the track. I was in luck; maybe. At the end of the track was a house with a fairly wide yard. I knocked on the door and, with my natural charm, best schoolboy French and a lot of miming I asked the woman if I could turn my grand camping-car around in her drive. She didn’t seem too phased, was I looking for Belleview camping? I guess this must have happened before.

Back to Nelly. Getting in the house’s drive was tight but the French woman was there to give me hand signals but when I made the first turn I thought, ‘this is fuckin’ impossible.’ Nelly is 8m long, the drive was about 8.5m wide and full of cars, vans, trailers and building rubble. Julie had wisely retreated to the rear.

After a lot of shuffling and after moving half a tonne of building rubble, thankfully in sacks, we were free. The French woman had been an absolute star with her hand signals but this has got to stop. This can never happen again; other couple have sex tapes, Julie and I have 25 minute reversing out of shit creek tapes!

When we did eventually find Parc Belleview Camping it was fuckin’ closed. I decided we should give up on Cannes and we made a safe landing in Antibes. We are going to stay for a few nights to recover.

Day 11 – Monday 19th March 2018

Up early to the sun; Julie and I have both settled into routines. I get up and get out of the way and Julie takes care of everything; feeding Cfor, sorting out the van and making her breakfast. I have stopped having breakfast now I am retired.

Cfor is in a routine now too. When we are parked up he likes to sit on the dash and look at the world from out of the windscreen. At night he curls up on a chair and just like at Julie’s he’s learned which is my favourite chair and he’ll only move for biscuits. In the mornings he likes to jump on the bed to remind us he needs feeding. Life is all food and sleep for him. The moment he hears the two buzzes of the immobiliser being disabled he knows we’ll soon be moving so he scurries into his pet carrier on the bed. He’s a very very good cat.

We decided to go into Nice today so we caught the train in. I must say Nice Ville is a very swanky place and it was wonderful to walk along the Promenade des Anglais in the spring sunshine.

We were walking around Nice’s smart harbour when we heard an enormous explosion. We wondered what the fuck had happened but no one else seemed in the least concerned. A quick search of Google revealed the midday cannon is an old tradition in Nice. It was instigated in Victorian times by some rich Brit who was fed up of his wife returning home late for lunch so he had a cannon fired at midday just to remind her of the time.

We had lunch on the beach but the smart streets are lined restaurants serving great big plates of food. I have to say for a nation that likes to tuck-in of lunchtime you don’t see too many fat people in France.

Think I caught a touch of the sun today which was nice seen as it was snowing in Reigate.

Day 12 – Tuesday 20th March

Up early to a milky sky. Took a walk to the very swanky Marina Baie des Anges at Villeneuve-Loubet.

This place is so posh they have a man on a scooter riding around hovering up any dogshit on the pavement into his top box. I bet he wraps his sandwiches up well!

Into Antibes on Zippy in the afternoon.You can park a scooter anywhere round here. Antibes has yet another huge yachting harbour ram-jammed full of unused play things. In the market there was a local selling cheese and he kept giving us samples. Yummy stuff but I am trying to keep the number of different cheeses in the fridge down to a reasonable level. Very windy at Antibes and you don’t notice how strong the sun is, got a burnt bonce.

Day 13 – Wednesday 21^st March 2018

What a fuckin’ day!

Woke up to grey skies and it was s a little bit chilly on the Cote d’Azur this morning.

After the incident in Cannes I thought it wise to review our route down to La Spezia. We have two problems; firstly a lot of the Italian campsites don’t open till Easter and secondly while these places have websites telling you how wonderful they are none of them mention they have difficult access. For that kind of information you need to read the reviews on Park4Night.

I had sorted out two possible harbour car parks as we got into Italy but after that nothing till Levanto; brilliant. Julie is not too happy about this and I can’t say I’m surprised so I made an executive decision, we would take toll roads and motorways to Levanto. This would be a no drama day.

Everything was fine until we reached the E80/A10 in Italy. The E80/A10 is basically a series of a few dozen tunnels through mountains all connected by a few dozen very high very long bridges. I’m not too fond of very high very long bridges but I have learnt to just look at the tarmac in front of me and think pleasant thoughts rather than wondering if the Mafia had anything to do with building them. Anyway it was windy, very windy and Nelly was being blown all over the place.

There were some road signs saying because of the high winds all trucks and caravans should use the slow lane (thank fuck I wasn’t pulling a caravan!)

So it was bearable although my hands, wrists and shoulders ached from the constant tension of keeping Nelly going in something like straight line. Not over the edge.

After about an hour of this signs came up saying the vento was over and trucks could now use the overtaking lane. Only the vento wasn’t bloody over so I had to not only put up with strong crosswinds I now had the bow-waves of trucks to deal with as we crossed the very high very long bridges. Each time we reached a tunnel it was such a relief.

On one bridge it was so bad I decided to get off at the next exit. I didn’t care where the fuck we were I needed to de-stress.

Once off the toll road and on to the SS1 I was full of the joys of spring; twisty and turning – I can do that all day. I really felt at home, especially as the Italian roads are just like British roads – full of potholes.

I took my time navigating the SS1. It really was great fun getting 8m of motorhome round this coastal road and we only had 4hours 40 minutes to go! Julie loved the views.

Then we hit Genoa. I don’t think anything can prepare you for the chaos that is an Italian city at rush hour. The road works, the swarms of scooters and the parking make it a stressful experience in an 8m motorhome. I think there must be an Italian law that says you can park a car or scooter where the – fuck – you- like. It’s a nightmare. Then we took a wrong turn and ended up on an elevated road with a weight limit of only 2.5t. I was sure I was going to get a ticket. I might yet get one in the post as there were some  Carabinieri by the slip road as I got on. Hopefully they were too busy smoking to notice me.

Doris guided us safely out of the city and we settled back down to the twists and turns of the SS1. It got a bit hairy at times but we coped. Eventually it came time to leave the SS1 for Levanto. Doris told us we would be taking the SP64. I very much doubt anyone would be allowed to use the SP64 in the UK. Steep going up and steep going down, full of hairpin bends and with a frightening lack of armco. The road sign said Levanto was only 14km away; Doris said 50 minutes. It was a good job no one else had a satnav as mad as Doris apart from some Carabinieri in a Land Rover and the odd cyclist we largely had the SP64 all to ourselves thank god. It was next to terrifying and I chatted to Julie to distract her from the dramatic views. Eventually we hit the town limits and after a couple of very tight hairpins where we grounded the scooter rack we reached our destination, Camping Albero D’Oro; it was fuckin’ closed.

Luckily I had seen an aire half a mile or so before and after one last little drama of a three point turn on a busy little road we were parked up for the night. Thank fuck. We had a cheese and wine evening. Julie says the only reason people live here is because they can’t face up to the journey out. Tomorrow La Spezia and we’ll be doing some serious relaxing.

Day 14 – Thursday 22^nd March 2018

Woke early to the wind rocking the van, I knew we had to get out of this town but how? Certainly not the way we arrived. I’d sell Nelly and walk home before I’d take the SP64 again. There were two other routes out of town, one along the coast to La Spezia which didn’t look too clever on Google maps and one back up through the hills which goggled showed as having two hairpin bends. Fuck.

There was no point in delaying it so we set off before 9am and were in La Spezia by 10:30. Compared to last night’s hairpins on the SP64 today’s turned out to be rather girly.

We are stopped at a compound over by La Spezia’s eastern docks; not very salubrious but the access was dead easy, it has electricity and it’s safe enough.

Had a walk into La Spezia itself. The area around the marina is pretty smart, yacht money must have paid for the smart bridge and shopping/restaurant complex but the town itself has seen better days. I think every town in Italy has seen better days. Compared to France the place looks unloved. No one seems to care that everything done in the last 50 years is slipshod, no one seems to care the place is filthy with litter, the roads are full of potholes and patched. Italy isn’t just a different country from France, it’s a totally different culture.

The weather here really is great. When we got home from our walk the van was so hot we had to turn the aircon on!

We are staying here for 3 nights so we can take the Ferry to see some on the Cinque Terre on Saturday. We have to fit that in because I doubt we’ll ever come back this way; the Italian Riviera isn’t the place for a motorhome. The SS1 is a fine road and the scenery is absolutely stunning but there are no places to park a van and the campsites are either up steep slopes or down dirt tracks and after the incident in Cannes I’m giving those a miss.