Bulletin 040 - La Belle France Encore!
April 2005
Chèr(e)s Ami(e)s,
One of our Regular Readers (that's the other one if it's not you!) wondered if the Rollingfruitbats got lost somewhere between northern Spain and Dover last Spring, or suddenly went Static, or fell off the Viaduct of Death or something, such has been the delay in posting this next Bulletin. We can only apologise and explain that in fact we did get notes and cartoons done at the time but somehow didn't manage to string them together coherently enough to get them to Webmaster Ken. Months, later, that's happened, so we hope you'll bear with us for the next couple of episodes while we play catch-up.
We're already into the autumn travel adventures (as if we haven't had a lifetime's worth of happenings over the summer in the UK and since we set sail South again in September!), so it's important we really do catch up with ourselves!
Where were we?
Somewhen back in the mists of time in April 2005, after our diversion into the handsome city of Burgos (anyone remember from Bulletin 039 when we were still en España?!), we picked up the N120 again which weaves alongside the Camino de Santiago, that famous Pilgrims Way. It's a route with lots of interesting small villages along its course, with even more than usually oversized churches. We've frequently noticed how the church is the focal point of any older Spanish town or village, positioned so that it can be seen for great distances around. Of course, it occupies that prominent position both literally and symbolically (the latter maybe more so in the past, if not to quite the same degree these days). These little villages along the Camino de Santiago are often even more dominated by their churches, presumably due to having had flocks of passing pilgrims popping in over the centuries. There was at least one village where we noticed a chapel carved into the hill.
Were going to stop at one of these villages but missed the turning to the Camping, so we decided to carry on to Haro, a beautiful old town we'd visited on the way down in October. To adjust our route slightly, Jeni had to take us on a minor detour which once again ended up with The Lorry bumping over a small, pot-holed road through agricultural land and vines - if any items in the overhead lockers hadn't dislodged themselves during the previous part of the day's journey, they certainly did then! Funny, Dave recalled, we had a similar kind of 'shortcut'/detour coming out of Haro last time - is there something about this territory which draws Jeni to investigate it in more detail?!
Haro Again!
Haro in the Spring sunshine, how lovely! We decided to have a couple of nights there to visit the town again, which was even nicer than we remembered it. It's ringed by imposing, interesting and of course highly visitable bodegas, as you may remember if you were travelling with us last autumn (as it were). Haro has a compelling medieval quarter, a grand church which sits high on a mound above the town, it's bustling and lively, has a beautiful main square for sitting drinking your coffee/beer and watching the world go by, and has good footpaths down by the tumbling river which runs alongside the Camping, just five minutes walk away on the edge of the town. Got a lot to offer, then? Oh yes.
It is also extremely storkitudinous - we constantly saw storks wheeling overhead, remarkably they were almost as numerous as the sparrows and smaller birds.
Wobble in the Wind
On what should have been our last night in Haro, we were woken up by the wind (not Dave's this time) - after a couple of very warm late spring days, it had turned very grey and blustery. We debated whether to stay another day, mainly for Jeni's benefit as she hates travelling in Big Winds, but in the end decided to move on as we needed to make reasonable progress north.
Jeni and Chip were both rather rattled by the buffeting the Lorry got along great stretches of the open road. Dave personfully grappled with wheel and we remembered that this was the area where on the way down through Spain the previous autumn, poor Sean and Daisy had lost the pop-top on their VW camper. So it's obviously a notoriously windy bit of road anyway, and even worse that particular day when it actually looked quite bleak and stormy.
Sadly we have to report that the lily-livered Jeni kept closing her eyes and reverting to swigs out of the Rescue Remedy bottle! She even decided Chip was a bit anxious about the winds at one point and put a couple of drops of Dr Bach's Rescue Remedy on his tongue! Dave insisted she was projecting her own unease on the courageous canine, or at the very least he was just picking up her own anxiety. Jeni maintains he would have been a gibbering wreck too, had she not been talking calmly to him, stroking him and administering the magic potion!
Rolling Fruitbats in Rolling Hills
The scenery in Rioja country around Haro and onwards north-east is fine. It gradually gives way to the verdant hills of the mountains south of San Sebastian. It's very green, courtesy of the high rainfall for a goodly part of the year, and heavy snowfalls in winter. So there are pastures up the high hills, with pine trees and the blossom still abounding at this time of year. The architecture changes again here and there are the gently pitched roofs with big overhangs, so familiar in other mountainous and alpine areas in Europe. There are timbered sections under the roofs, in characteristic Basque-area colours of cream and dark maroony-red. Very picturesque.
And by this stage the winds had abated, so we were all able to enjoy the scenery without fingernails bruising palms or sharp intakes of breath at each gust.
La Belle France
And thus we crossed the non-existent border again and back into France. What did we notice straight away? Roundabouts bursting with spring flowers, changes in supermarket contents, Camping Car designated parking in many villages and car parks, easy places to stop for a rest or to use services and a boulangerie on every other corner. Oh yes, France is a good place to be when you're in a motorhome.
Onward through pinewoods and marshes, having skirted round the coastal towns near the border, rejoicing in the frequent, well maintained and pleasant picnic/rest areas en route. Chip is considering producing the canine guide to roadside rest areas in France and Spain with recommendations for those with particularly good walkies and racing-around-off-the-lead areas. (Presumably he'd award five bones for the best aires de répos, and so on ... )
We were on the edges of Les Landes Parc Naturel and had a night's stop in a strange little village called Saas et Gourby, south west of the spa town of Dax. Strange because it had an imposing oldish church, but almost the whole of the rest of the village was composed of modern bungalows. However, it was a very pleasant spot for an overnighter, with great walks along the river and right on the edge of the huge Parc Naturel. And as someone pointed out to us, only 20km from the coast. Can't be bad.
Both storks and topiary were a feature here too - those seemed to have been motifs for our journey northwards thus far. The village had its name picked out in low, neat Box hedging, and there were a couple of storks circling overhead with nest-building materials in beaks. On one of her petites promenades avec Chip, chatting to a villager (in something akin to Sprench, or Franish, since she was having trouble reverting back to French!), Jeni learned that not only was there a stork nesting on the church roof, but there were nationally famous storks with nests on pylons along the high-speed railway line nearby. Apparently there were about eight or nine atop adjacent pylons and it didn't seem to bother them in the slightest that every so often a train would whistle through at near-sonic speeds!
Bull Ring Surprise
One unexpected rest stop during that part of the journey found us near a little village called St Vincent, where the aire de répos was right by a smallish bull ring. Quick decko at the guide books and we discovered, to our surprise, that the old bull fighting is not just a Spanish phenomenon. Well, well. Dave consoled Jeni by spinning a yarn about more humane bull fighting being carried out these days, involving pantomime bulls and arrows with rubber suction cups on the end … maybe?!
On another stop we found a wonderful Camping just outside the small town of Miramont sur Guyenne. What a find! It was in an enormous recreation/park area with walks through the woods and round the lake - idyllic. Our pitch was right by the lake (which might be less pleasant in serious mosquito season of course, but there was enough gentle breeze when we were there to keep the midgies at bay) ... we could have fished from the Lorry window if we'd had a mind.
Indeed, one of the only two other Camping Caristes on the site had six fishing rods lined up outside his van - he obviously had the family coming to dinner! It was a great place to stop, and the pleasing little town had a bustling Monday market, and could even have offered us a neat and well maintained Camping Municipal right on the edge of the town, had we not opted to be a couple of kilometres further out by the lake. Good one!
Also Recommended ...
Also noteworthy, especially for our fellow Camping Car-iste friends, was a stop in the delightful Neris Les Bains. This is a small, elegant spa town, with the excellent Camping within five minutes walk of the centre. Here you could take the waters, or be submerged in them or whatever is your particular approach, then come straight out and bimble along the boulevard, stopping at numerous cafés as you did so.
Oh, and for our fellow travellers on tight budgets, please note that the charming Camping at Neris Les Bains has an aire de service as well. It offers free motorhome parking for two nights at the edge of the site, and for a modest couple of euros you could have a shower and use the hot water for washing up. A one euro token will also get you an hour's blast of electricity to recharge your phones and laptops etc. Can't say fairer than that, eh? (Advert over.)
Domestic Disharmony
Now it's not all sweetness and light. Dave thinks it's always been a bit of a problem, this washing up lark. It isn't that there are fights about whose turn it is or anything so mundane, it's just that in our Lorryhold, Jeni always leaps to volunteer to take the buckets over to the washing up sinks when we are staying on Campings. Like reading food packets and taking the dog for a walk, she sees it as another Language Development Opportunity as it inevitably means falling into conversation with All And Sundry.
That's the problem. Señora/Madame Fruitbat goes off with the buckets saying to Dave "There's not a lot here, I'll only be 15 minutes". Huh! Frequently it's half an hour, forty five minutes and even, on a couple of notorious occasions, an hour before she returns. "Sorry, love, got chatting with someone at the sinks!". And when we are in France and Dave realises she can have more in-depth conversations in her better language. He resigns himself to building in huge delay factors when Jeni tootles off with her buckets. At the Camping at Neris Les Bains, for example, she returned (much later) to describe a conversation she'd had with an older French man whose wife was in the town to 'take the waters' or, as he said, for 'the cure'. Yes, it's very effective, he assured Jeni, "My wife is a new woman when she's taken the waters!"
Thence it was that we tootled on just a short distance to Lusigny, a little village near Moulins, where we had surprised some friends with a phonecall saying that we were in the area and were they free to meet up? As you know, this kind of behaviour isn't that unusual for gregarious Fruitbats, but this was a visit with a difference.
However, in order to crank up the suspense, we'll save this wonderful little tale for a separate Bulletin (in Blue Peter style, prepared earlier, so arriving on the website almost simultaneously with this one you may be glad to know).
Until then, groses bisous à tous,
Dave, Jeni et Chip Fruitbat
xxx
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