Back on the road

It’s been two years since we returned from what I like to refer to as our “World Tour”. We went back to work, back to “normal” life and, as Soul II Soul once sang, back to reality. Now, with a couple of redundancies under our belt, we’ve decided to go back on the road. So, what’s changed? Well, our Ebay van, the massively ungainly mobile bungalow with a 5.7litre V8 engine went, fittingly, back on Ebay to bring its own particular brand of joy/heartache/stress-related illness to a new owner. With the proceeds we have “down-sized” to what is almost the polar-opposite in vehicular terms - an air-cooled Volkswagen T25. It is essentially a bright yellow bread bin with a wheel on each corner, powered by the motor from a lawnmower. This means that it is much easier to drive but much smaller to live in. It’s what an estate agent might call “bijoux”. It still has a stove, a fridge, a sink, a bed - it’s just that you can only use one of these things at any one time. But, on the plus side, you do have the added pleasure of being waved at by other owners of motorised bread bins.

 “But where are you going in your little yellow van?” you ask. Well, as you’ve asked, I will tell you. The plan is very simple - to drive to Croatia via France and Italy. Just a little trip relative to our last adventure but a massively daunting task in our chosen mode of transport. As ever, we didn’t really think it through. The air-cooled engine, as the name might suggest, needs a lot of cool air otherwise it smells like it’s about to explode. This means that we have to take a break every two or three hours so that the engine can calm down and get a grip on itself. Added to this, the van has decided that it will only let me select second gear when it chooses - which can be a bit stressful on, say, a hill or busy roundabout. Anyway, despite these setbacks, we have managed to coax the little bugger onto a ferry, across the Channel and into France.

What we weren’t expecting for September was glorious sunshine. Another feature of the van we discovered is that it can harness this glorious sunshine and, with its tin roof and a giant magnifying glass for a windscreen, amplify it to a heat capable of roasting a Christmas dinner. So, with our temperatures rising, our patience melting and our skin becoming crackling, imagine our joy as we stumbled across our first campsite - right next to a beautiful river and replete with cold beer and a swimming pool. If we could have rubbed a lamp and wished for three things to be waiting for us, it would have been those three (Well, maybe the beer was my wish but, hey, Claire chose a bloody river). That was the moment when we realised that we were back doing what we love doing. 

As a result of our obligatory engine breaks, our lunch stops have become quite a daily highlight as we try to find ever more interesting places to stop. So far we have had lunch by a lake, in the foothills of the Alps… and on a bit of waste ground by a level crossing. As you can see, we are trying the full gamut of beauty spots.

Quite a lot of France seems to be shut at the moment and it’s like the whole country is “out of season”. We spent a night in a town called Gray which, despite its name, was actually quite pretty and quaint with a beautiful medieval old town. However, we tried to find a bar open after 6pm and drew a blank. A local woman I interrogated in my best Francais suggested that we might want to try McDonalds, as they sell beer. Not what we had in mind. Turns out chicken nuggets make an ideal beer snack though.

Annecy was a bit more promising. It is a beautiful old town at the top of Lake Annecy where swan-laden canals wend their way through crumbly old medieval buildings and tourists wander the streets, filling their camera’s memory card with street scenes and deciding which bistro to have lunch in. That’s what we did anyway. We were there to meet a couple of friends of ours, Heather and Liz, and spend a day or two relaxing, indulging and not driving. It was the perfect place to be. Our campsite was a very pleasant half hour cycle ride from the town and it was still quite pleasant even after a big dinner, a lot of wine and in total darkness.

The only drawback from being in the mountains, though, is that there are a lot of steep roads which meant that when we had to leave Annecy, the poor little bread bin was really put to the test. We urged it up the steep inclines as lorries, buses and occasionally even cyclists whizzed past us. That elusive second gear came into its own as we rattled up and up, straining and gurgling towards Mont Blanc and its tunnel. If we could just get to the tunnel, the next stop would be Italy…