Camping part 2

Eric’s holiday diary:

(I did 1 bellyflop! I was happy and hired a pédalo with a slide. I went down the slide 3X. For tea I had nuggets and chips and salted caramel ice cream.)

Percy has written in his diary that he did 77 farts this holiday.

I finished the last blog on a cliff hanger: we were stuck with a broken car in the town of Evian. And sorry to disappoint you, but we did make it back fine. I know most of my blog readers prefer it when I’m in some kind of jeopardy. Most of my everyday life kind of blogs get 80 -120 views. But when something is going bad for me I get around 300 views. That means there about 200 people who think, “oh Hannah’s fine, just enjoying her life, I’m not reading that.” You guys reading this now are mainly the good guys though, “camping part 2” is not a very clickbaity title, so you must actually like me or my writing or just be very bored and procrastinating doing something. Either way thanks for being here.

There was a little bit of jeopardy. Check out this giant spider that I found in our tent:

Also the car went to get fixed in Evian and while they were fixing it they said ,“by the way your tyre is dangerously worn.” You could actually see the metal bits poking out. This was on a Friday afternoon and they didn’t have time to fix it, so even though the orignal problem was fixed we were still stuck with a dangerous car and we couldn’t fix that until after the weekend, and a long drive to Lyon.

Evian was fun. It’s the French bit of lake Geneva, they actually call the lake another random French name just to be awkward. Like people who say vacuum cleaner and vulva when hoover and vagina work fine. Anyway we went to see the home of bottled water, there’s a bit where water constantly flows from a pretty mosaic and that water is proper Evian water, people fill up bottles and bottles of the stuff. 

But we did a blind taste test for Dan and he couldn’t tell the difference between tap water and Evian water. So there’s really no need to be filling bottles. Nearby is a sort of Evian water museum, like a healthy Cadbury’s world. You can buy Evian merch and learn how they get it out of the ground.

We were staying with Dans parent’s in an airbnb that was right by the lake, there was a nice little playground where we had a picnic on the last evening and went for a swim. On the return journey we stopped in at Geneva, partly so the kids could say they’ve been to another country. Me and Dan have been before on our big 2013 adventure so the fact that it was a different country was a mild inconvenience, it’s not even in the EU so you would get charged a lot for using a phone and the currency was different. We went to the same lake beach we went to in 2013 and we went to see the massive fountain. We were taking bets on how many daddies high it was, the answer is 76. 

We left to Lyon while trying not to use the sat nav so we didn’t get internet charges. Geneva is very near to France on 3 sides of it, so we figured it couldn’t be that difficult to get to the French bit and then put the sat nav on for the rest of the ride. We did not go the most efficient way! But we got there despite our dangerous tyre. Unfortunately the airbnb lady for the apartment we were meant to be staying in didn’t tell us the code to get in and was not answering her phone, so we had a while standing around on the street needing a wee googling other places to stay before she finally bothered to tell us the code.

We arrived in Lyon on Bastille Day but neither of us could be bothered to go out and see the fireworks, we just sat and half watched the England Spain football thingy. Spoiler alert it’s not coming home. But I did have a nice text conversation with my Spanish friend who I can only talk to in French saying things like “bravo” when they scored, with football emojis to make up for the lack of sentences. I bet I would have been a great ancient Egyptian. I love emojis, I prefer cats to dogs, and I just like their whole fashion vibe, I’d really have to practice my eyeliner technique though.

We didn’t see a lot of Lyon. On the Monday Dan finally managed to get the tyre sorted, while me and the kids got lost in a massive shopping center. We managed to get sleeping bags though, in preparation for the next bit of camping. We also briefly went to a great park that had a free zoo in it! 

Percy was concerned the ducks were getting less attention than average in this park so he made sure to talk to them.

Our final stop of the road trip was Vallon Pont d’Arc which was amazing! Our pitch overlooked the river beach which was just 1k from the famous natural rock bridge. We only had one full day there but we made the best of it by doing a 3 hour 7k family kayak trip. You get dropped off at one end so that you’re only travelling with the river and then we kayaked right past our campsite and through some rapids and finally right through the arc. I was nervous, the minimum age was 7 and we had to prove Eric was 7 because he looks so little. They told us one of the rapids was especially difficult, and I just didn’t know how they would cope if they were scared. But they coped really well. At first I was with Percy, and we got stuck on some rocks in a rapid and ended up going down backwards but he was fine. Then we swapped kids and Eric was also doing a great job, at one point he said, “paddle mummy, this is no time for taking photos!”

We stopped for a picnic lunch, or as the French call it a pique-nique (I just really enjoy that word). We made a stop to explore a cave including one that you can walk in and at the back there’s a hole that you can crawl in and then you come out kind of on top of the cave and from there you can jump off into the river. So fun.

In the evening I decided to not go to my online French lesson, it would have been hard with bad internet and no way to charge stuff, and instead go to a night market in the local town. It was such a big market, lots of cool stuff to buy and also an exhibition of the kayaks from previous Olympians that are from the area. The only thing we bought was ice cream. 

On the last day we packed up our tent early and went to see the Tour de France. They were starting about 45 minutes away from us and Dan has been wanting to see it for ages. He said if you get there at the right time you can get free stuff, hats and T-shirts and things that companies throw out of their vehicles. We made it in pretty good time but it was busy and difficult to park. We followed the crowds to a car park where all these mad cars were, there were cars shaped like Orangina bottles, and laughing cow cheese and washing detergent bottles, loads of different mad stuff which was cool to see. We saw the cars leave the car park on their journey but we weren’t in the right place where they were throwing out the free stuff, and we couldn’t get to that bit because of the crowds and the police. Eventually we made it there just as they were finishing up with throwing stuff. It was very cool to see all the fun cars though.

The actual race doesn’t then start for at least another 2 hours, you see the big coaches with the teams in them and all the bikes on car roofs, but from where we were you can’t easily get to a bit of the race where we could actually see them race. We waited around for a while and then finally found that in the village they had made a stage and they were introducing the cyclists team by team and then they would do a little practise cycle through the village center. There were also more people giving out free stuff and we managed to get a shopping bag two awful hats and 3 cans of non alcoholic beer.

Dan wearing an awful free hat with some cyclists in the background.

We saw Mark Cavendish and a guy who I like to call “egg on a barn owl” (Colombian cyclist Egan Bernal). Dan was a bit disappointed to not get to see any actual racing but next year we’ll be prepared. It was nice to arrive home from holiday and it’s still hot and sunny. In 48 hours we managed to get 5 loads of washing done!

Feeling very grateful that we got this time away and that our car works now, and feeling very motivated to make things work here so we can stay and have more Europe adventure road trips.

How not to camp

We are currently on holiday, and I have some beautiful pictures to share but I feel like you need some words for the full story. I can’t just share the beautiful bits, that’s not real life, you have to see the state of our cool box too.

We’re doing a road trip from our house in Perpignan to the Swiss border to meet Dan’s parents. So far we’ve been to some incredibly amazing places but it hasn’t been easy. A week before we left our car developed a problem where it lost power and couldn’t go very fast, especially on a hill. Dan managed to order a part and fit it, he took it for a test drive on the fast roads and it all seemed fine. We were very relieved because we feel like we need a nice holiday. All the finding a job stuff has been stressful and it would be great to try and have a break from it all and enjoy exploring some beautiful parts of France.

I really wanted to try camping as we did it a lot when I was a kid and we’ve not yet done it with the boys, apart from in a van which is cheating. So we’ve managed to borrow and buy most of the stuff you need. We set off on our journey with the car packed to the brim. Our first stop was a campsite by lake Verdon north of Marseille. We were going to break up that journey with a few stops though, the first being Séte just outside Montpellier. Just before we got there the car warning light went on again and we lost full power. 

We tried to chat about our options while down playing the problem to the kids. Obviously the car needs to be fixed but without being in one place for long it would be hard to do that. We really wanted to continue the journey but was it wise to carry on driving to the campsite in the wilderness with a problem car? And were we actually in danger of the car just completely stopping or bursting into flames while we were in it. Spoiler alert we are all still alive.

Dan had this way of resetting the car so it didn’t think there was a problem and it worked normally for a bit, we had driven an hour and a half on fast roads fine before this happened. If we could reset it and get another hour and a half out of it we’d be nearly there. There was no real point stopping where we were to get the car fixed because it was a Sunday and so they wouldn’t be able to look at it that day anyway. So Dan reset the car and we continued our journey, but after about 10 minutes the problem returned and we quickly realised that in order to get anywhere we would have to go very slow. We continued driving nervously onto Arles where we stopped at a sculpture gallery with a big slide. And then we carried on to lake Verdon. We were camping there for 3 nights so we figured if we got there we could at least have the chance to go the garage and ask their opinion.

While we were putting up our tent in the beautiful lake Verdon area, I felt like we were obvious camping virgins. We are a family of 4 in a 3 man tent. We didn’t have a table which did make things tricky, one day a couple who were going out for food lent us their table because we obviously looked like we were struggling to cook and eat pasta on the floor. We also didn’t have warm bedding. It’s really warm at night normally and the car was very full so I thought just a little blanket would be fine for me and Dan. It turns out it’s really cold at 4am. So I ended up wearing a lot of clothes plus one of the kids poncho towels with hoods round my feet as a kind of bad sleeping bag. 

Also top tip cool bags aren’t cool bags forever. Day one they’re great. We made up some pasta sauces before hand and froze them which kept everything cool. But by day two our cool bag looked like this:

The couple who lent us the table had a plug in cool box. Boring!

I loved the campsite though, it was very small so the boys could go and do their own thing without getting lost. There was a beautiful little pool and some trampolines, some table tennis tables and an area for boules. Percy even said “normally screen time is the best bit of my day but I haven’t had it here and I haven’t missed it.”

Campsite pool

Lake Verdon

The lake was incredibly beautiful, a perfect turquoise colour and it was a lovely temperature to swim in  on a hot day. It’s not really near a city so it doesn’t feel too full of people it felt like we had found a secret part of France that English people didn’t know about. The first day we swam and the second day we hired a pédalo with a slide. That was so much fun, if someone said to me you can have any boat in the world I’d pick that one over a fancy yacht. Of course I tried going down head first and backwards.

In between all the fun Dan took the car to the garage and the guy said there’s a hole in a tube somewhere but you’ll be ok to drive it slowly. That reassured us a bit that it wasn’t going to burst into flames. But we had a really long mountainous trip to make from Verdon to Annecy on the windy slow roads.

That day turned out to be even more ridiculous and long than we imagined. In a working car on the autoroutes with no stops it should take 4.5 hours but with a slow car and kids that need regular breaks door to door it took 11 hours. At the first stop in Gap (it’s a city not a clothes shop) we went to an outdoor shop, to see if we could buy more sleeping bags. And if you’ve got a ton of money and you’re about to climb Everest this would be a great shop for you. They had many different kinds of sleeping bags starting from 100 euros. No thanks, I’d rather sleep in my child’s upside down hooded towel. Which was still an upgrade from 2013 when we slept on a beach in Greece with no tent and no sleeping bag and Dan wore a dress as a scarf. We’ve really come a long way,

The 11 hours also included a lot of messing around at the end when Dan dropped me and the boys and a load of bags off where he thought was 2 minutes walk away from where we were staying while he went to find parking. But we were actually ages away and had a lot of bags and a very tired 7 year old who claimed he was unable to carry anything. Eventually we found the little apartment and then all (separately) had a cold bath to chill out before bed.

The next day was a lot better, Annecy is an incredibly beautiful place. The city is really old and beautiful but the lake was just incredible. It was pretty touristy though and a lot more expensive to hire a boat than in Verdon, so we went to the area where you can eat a picnic and swim. 

After that we had a relatively short journey to Evian, on of the French bit of lake Geneva, where we met Dan’s parents. They were in the area to go to a jazz festival, and they kindly went to a Renault garage for us before we arrived to order this very expensive pipe, which they should be fitting today.

Did we get it fixed? Did we make it back home again? Did Dan get a job? Will camping round 2 in Vallon pont d’arc go ok? This stuff hasn’t happened yet so carry on following this blog to find out.