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.