We left home on 19th Jan, grateful for the return of reasonable weather. A good run of 430 miles through France took us to an overnighter at motorway services 40 miles beyond Troyes. Our thoughts of heading towards ever improving weather were somewhat shattered on looking out next morning….
Keep travelling south, it’s bound to improve! And it did: we ran out of the snow in about an hour. So now let’s stop for coffee & croissants: even on motorways, we said, in France you still get freshly made coffee.
But times move on, and the motorway services presented us with banks of drinks machines. I counted them: there were an amazing 18 machines scattered around in groups, not all the same, most able to dispense a huge variety of drinks. We had an acceptable chocolate drink each, but I wondered how the economics of this high-tech set-up compares with a couple of café girls. We needed the services of a person anyway as the machine delivered only one drink instead of the two we’d paid for!
That evening we arrive at a pleasant site on the banks of the river Rhone. There’s a biting wind making it feel very cold, but wrapping up warm we take an evening walk into the pleasant town of Tournon-sur-Rhone. There are a number of huge barges plying the river and it’s a shame we don’t have navigable rivers of this size in the UK to slightly ease our road congestion.
Pyrenees next stop, just into Spain. We’ve stayed at this site before and it’s beautifully located in pine and cork oak hills. Still cold and even windier but sunny, so we togged up as on the day before and had a splendid hour’s brisk walk. It’s a wonder the site is open in winter as we were the only touring folks there, but there is a residential section so it presumably takes no more manpower to run the whole lot.
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