France
My birthday!
By the time I'd opened my birthday cards (all two of them - I expect to arrive home to a large pile of them in the porch) and the one present I'd let Claire bring with us, and we'd had showers, packed up, and visited the supermarket to stock up on some particularly nice wine we'd found there, it was 12.00. Which I didn't think was a problem as it was only about a 3 hour drive to Honfleur. But when we got the sat nav going it informed us that it was actually a 4 hour drive so we hurried up and got on the road.
It was hot and sunny and George's air conditioning was still making the horrible noise. Plus, my nose was really tickly and snotty. Then the air con stopped working altogether. I'm still not sure if the tickly nose and the broken air con are linked. We arrived in Honfleur at about 5pm after a break for lunch. First stop was a chemist for me to get some decongestant. The pharmacist didn't speak English but handed over some sort of generic decongestant when I asked for Le Sudafed and sniffed a bit.
We checked in at the only campsite in Honfleur a short while later and spent an hour finishing the rest of the beer and waiting for my tickly nose to settle down. Which it did fortunately. The campsite was by far the least nice of the trip. The only things it had going for it was that it was fairly cheap and only a short walk from the town. Oh, and it did have a really funny poorly translated notice in the ladies toilets warning us not to put our stamps or sanitary towels down the toilet. I'm not sure why they decided to translate tampon (French) to stamp instead of tampon. It shouldn't have been a difficult bit of translating. Maybe an illustration would have been better?
Generally, we have been impressed by the French campsites. They all have plenty of flat pitches, and often have large private pitches with little hedges round them. The showers blocks have been generally cleaner with less spiders than their British counterparts. The prices are pretty good for what you get compared to the UK. The only thing that lets them down is the toilets. Most of them don't provide toilet paper or hand soap, none of them have had seats, some of them have spiders, and one of them gave me a wet foot! But on the whole the sites are better than what we are used to back home.
We walked into town for an end of holiday / birthday dinner. The town is full of restaurants, and I had been warned that they're not particularly cheap by both people who'd recommended Honfleur to me. After a few minutes of wandering round we settled on a quaint looking one on the corner of the square.
We both chose a set menu type thing for €22.50 each, which turned out to be 4 courses! I had mussels, monkfish, cheese and profiteroles and Claire had a cheese and cucumber salad (not sure why as she clearly had food envy), steak, cheese and a ice cream ball thing with nuts on the outside. The food was lovely, we shared a bottle of wine, and even with that the whole bill only came to €60 (£50). So I don't know where the rest of you have been eating but they obviously saw you coming.
We thought Honfleur was a very nice little town, although we would have happily traded some of it's niceness for a better campsite. It is obviously a major stopover for people who are catching a ferry from Calais the next day. We saw more British vehicles there than we've seen the whole time we've been in France.
We waddled back to the van and had a rather restless night due to too much food. This morning I had the second worst shower of the trip (it was free and unlimited but tepid and uncontrollably squirty). We picked up some croissants on the way out of town and then set off for Calais on the motorway.
The drive to Calais was pretty unblogworthy. My nose was OK but I don't know if that was because I'd switched the fan off or I'd taken a precautionary decongestant tablet. We arrived hours early and called in at the Calais Wine Warehouse and bought a few cases of wine with the intention of saving us some money between now and Christmas. That of course depends on our will power in making it last until Christmas.
Driving between the wine warehouse and the port was a bit scary though. My mum had been warning me about all the wannabe illegal immigrants in Calais, and how careful we had to be that we didn't get any stowaways. I thought she was exaggerating, but the roads were lined with people I can only assume we're looking for some transport across the channel. I know you probably think I'm stereotyping, but in this case I'm pretty sure my stereotype was right. There were tents pitched on grass verges and clothes hung up to dry on fences. We had a French driver in front of us who wanted to drive at 1mph, which was not what we wanted to do in a van with British plates on surrounded by people who wanted to get in it. We went straight to the port instead of looking for somewhere nice to have lunch, and have spent out last few hours in France drinking tea in George on a car park at the port.
We will be getting on the ferry shortly so I will sign off for this trip. We've thoroughly enjoyed our 2 weeks in France, despite the lack of toilet paper and the mosquito bites. Claire is even talking about doing some French evening classes! I'm sure we will be back, if not next year then the year after that.
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