Sunday, July 20, 2008

Friday 18th July-2008 A train ride to nowhere


Well the good weathers back and the sun was burning through quite early in the morning.

We felt that as we were planning to leave here around the end of July and start heading home that we should book a ferry as no doubt being in the thick of holiday time it might be difficult. Being also aware that the first weekend in August the motorways, particularly those going south from Paris will be a nightmare we decided that we would go home via a different route to the one we came on. This made sense of course as we are further down in France and more to the West and to go back via the East of Paris would be daft.

So using Skype we phoned the Camping and Caravan Club and they have booked us on the LD Ferries service from Le Havre to Portsmouth route for Sunday evening the 3rd of August. This should get us home around midnight on Sunday. A bit late but the roads should be clear.

We now need to find some sites for our journey home and this we will do later today as we have four books to choose from so hopefully we could find somewhere nice.

Villefranche was fairly quiet and we had a sandwich sitting in the town square waiting for the Petit Train to leave.

The journey on the train lasted about 40 minutes and took us around the town to show us the high spots which quite frankly we had seen before many times, but it was still nice to see them from a new perspective.

A bit of shopping at the Hyper U and we slowly headed home for an early tea. We had decided to have chicken salad, very nice. We met another couple in another Bailey Senator caravan and chatted to them for a while. They came with the intention of spending 3 days here, never have been to this site before, and ended up by booking 7 nights as they like it so much. Their plan is to leave early tomorrow and head for Saumer and visit the vineyards for a little sampling. So we said goodbye and hoped they enjoy their journey.

Mike, the campsite owner arrived to remind us of the evening market at Calvinac but we had decided not to go. This was probably a wise decision as a number of people who visited the town were disappointed as there were only eight stalls with not much going on and so they left after only half an hour and returned to the site.