Italy bound

 A cockerel this morning reminds me that we are in France, finally Italy bound. We’ve survived so far though we do have a few battle scars. In spite of the weeks of preparation, getting on the road was a bit of a scramble in the end and something we forgot to do was to find an app that would translate “Gareth-speak” to “Alison-speak” and vice versa! We’ve also been forced to bring with us one tooth abscess, a tummy bug and the remains of a yucky cold, plus the arthritic conditions we were already lumbered with, like Gareth’s crumbling hip.

But the adventure has begun. Wednesday got us to Canterbury, via the delightful M25 at rush hour (yes, we started out later than we intended). The torture of home time traffic isn’t something I would inflict on anyone and I marvelled at the minimal number of insanity breakouts in that cloggy flow, at least in so far as I could detect any. Goodness knows what the occupants of all those vehicles were going through while slow going traffic munched away at their living time.

Anyway, the one-of-only-three-in-the-country-aires in Canterbury (the Park and Ride on New Dover Road) was a most convenient night stop. We weren’t very clever in our choice of parking bay, though, as it was right next to the grey water and chemical toilet disposal. This became evident next morning as Motorhomes turned up next to us to defecate, some very muckily. There were some veteran vans parked up in better spots and we could sense their assessment of us as new on the scene in spite of our van being twelve years old. We are entering the Travellers’ world and it feels a bit as though we have run away to the circus. 

It was nice to stand around the vans chatting with others and absorbing their useful travelling tips and tales. We learned quite a lot that evening, including the fact that the info given on the net rarely reflects the truth on the ground. The £3.50 per night charge we were expecting to pay for the stop over turned out to be £7.00. Yes, that’s still very cheap, admittedly, but the channel crossings also suddenly were more expensive. We couldn’t get one before Friday morning anyway, which meant another day in Blighty (where does that nickname come from?). We (I mean Gareth) had picked out DFDS Dover to Dunkirk as the best crossing for the dogs, failing the Chunnel that is. DFDS provide on-deck kennels for dogs, so he thought, but then it turned out that they didn’t, and that there was an additional charge for dogs. We have two, remember.

So, costs were already running outside of our (Gareth’s) estimated budget. He has spent hours and hours, bless him, ‘burning the midnight oil’ researching, planning and budgeting this trip, including the best way to travel with dogs. Bess had a fit the night before we left, probably because she sensed something was imminent. She has had fits before and is a very stressy dog. We weren’t sure how she would cope with having to stay in the Hymer in the bowels of the ferry, left to her own devices with Pwdin, our nice-but-dim other little spaniel. We knew that Pwdin wouldn’t be a problem as she takes everything in her stride.

A day to kill around Canterbury was just as well in the end. It meant we could stock up on a few things and deal with our house purchase. Contracts were exchanged, insurances organised and instructions given to our selected letting agent to receive the keys on completion and start the process of getting us a tenant. Next day we became house owners while we were half way across the English Channel.

Another night in the Park and Ride, albeit in a better spot, and in the morning we set off for Dover. I’m a landlubber and my usual nervousness about things like aeroplanes and ships kicked in as we got to the port. Projecting my fear onto the dogs, I started worrying and fussing about them and now realise that I have a default mother hen reaction to pets as I do with the grandchildren. Once you’ve been a mother having to marshal a posse of small lively children, you never get out of the habit. In any case we had to leave the dogs, so we gave them a selection of treats and then headed for the upper decks.

Sitting watching the world go by (or in this case, a huge expanse of water) inevitably leads to mental wanderings. Thinking about travels throughout my life it occurred to me that through my and my sisters’ childhoods, our parents, who had at that time never really travelled, allowed each of us some amazing travel opportunities. In my case, at the age of ten, I went on an educational cruise around Scandinavia on the ship Devonia; I still have the scrap book journal of it somewhere. In my late teens I spent three weeks in Germany with a youth group where I met the father of my sons, my now ex husband. My sisters also had amazing experiences afforded them and all three of us spent one summer holiday at a Quaker summer school. We watched the first moon landing there. They were all wonderful, unforgettable experiences, probably brought about through my mother’s quiet influence, it occurs to me now. Our academically gifted mother was keen to provide us with a rounded education and the sorts of cosmopolitan experiences that she herself had relinquished any prospect of in order to be with our more wayward father. His influence, on the other hand, was in providing us with a sense of the wild, both in nature and in thought (as long as those wild thoughts coincided with his own of course!)

I needn’t have worried about the dogs, by the way. They were happy to see us when we got back to the vehicle and seemed none the worse for their temporary abandonment. We landed and took off along the French/Belgian border, hit rain, had a repeat of the M25 experience around Lille and headed for where we intended a night stop. Inevitably things got tricky. 

After a few hairy moments like forgetting which side of the road we should be on and driving around in circles through little villages trying to locate somewhere indicated on an app, we abandoned that plan and ‘conferred’ on a new one. This is where the Gareth/Alison translator app would have been handy. I can’t fault his efforts to equip us with a range of technical aids but operating between four phones, an iPad, a Mac, a SatNav, a book of European maps, a ‘Budget Guide to Europe’ and the ACSI camping guide has challenged my non-techy linear brain. And a brain still foggy with virus wasn’t helping. Needless to say, our first night camped, finally, in a little aire in Cateau-Cambresis was not the most convivial.

This morning, Saturday, we resolved to be better prepared. And we were until we found ourselves stuck up a narrow cul de sac in the middle of Charlevilles-Mezieres, Gareth red in the face as he tried reversing all the way out again. Our souvenir of that little excursion could be a collection of traffic transgression tickets when we get home! 

Anyway, we eventually found, through good old Google (none of these fancy apps) a nice municipal camp site in the Ardennes town of Sedan. The sun came out and we took a nice little walk into the old town, had a few beers and a pizza before returning to watch the sunset from the van. This trip isn’t being particularly Headless (see previous blogs) so far, except in the ‘headless chicken’ meaning of the term, but it’s been a nice evening and tomorrow is another day.