Day 5: Low Gear

Song of the day: Top Gear theme tune

Miles travelled: 246.4

Today was mostly a day of travel, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about life on the road, in the van. So far, we’ve travelled through almost every type of weather that France has to offer: sun, rain, torrential rain, hail and fog. Not bad for only 4 days in the country. Our little van is only a 2 litre petrol, so there is no taking advantage of the 130km speed limit on the highway, about 100km is all we can really manage, and even then the van gets the shakes at anything approaching 105km.

We’ve named the van Jarno. For those of you who don’t follow the F1 (that would be almost all of you, I’d assume), the name comes from a Toyota driver called Jarno Trulli. He is by no means the favourite of either of us, but the Toyota he drives is white (as is the van), and he has an annoying habit on the race track of creating what we call a “moving chicane”, in other words, a moving object that is so slow it must be passed, yet annoyingly, keeps moving. This is a bit like the van – since we can only manage about 100km, and the French have much more powerful cars in general, we are constantly being passed, struggling up hills in 3^rd gear (hence the title of today’s blog).

We’ve travelled from Le Mont St Michel to just outside La Rochelle today, to an island called Ile de Re. Despite our top speed, we usually make fairly good time. The bit we haven’t quite mastered yet is finding campsites, which usually takes us a couple of hours. This will come with time I expect. The thing we have mastered (fairly well at least) is right-hand driving. It’s always a bit hairy when you get to a round-a-bout (for the uninitiated – you have to go anti-clockwise), but we’ve only had one or two near misses (neither of which were due to going the wrong way) and had more to do with the French round-a-bout layout than massive errors on our part.

We’ve got the packing up of the van down to a (half hour) fine art now, putting away the cushions, folding up the chairs, and disconnecting ourselves from the main power supply. Having electricity in the van is brilliant, and allows us to blog every night, even if we have to wait a few days to post when we have an internet connection. Cam also clears the photos every day, and charges up the camera batteries for the following day, which are getting quite a work out. Hopefully there will be some photos to post soon, as we head off to Bordeaux on Friday for a friends birthday.