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.