Sunday 26th October
We decided to stay in Marboue today since it was a nice free aire and whilst there was a main road in sight, the traffic was light since it was a Sunday. Theres no point going to a big town on Sunday, the shops are shut. The road through Marboue, the N10, is marked on our Michelin guide in red. It seems that all the red roads are main roads equivalent to something like our A12 but slightly “French”.
They are for the most part, arrow straight, and dual carriageway with a surface as smooth as a babes bum. Frankie loves this bit of the red roads since he can forget about the shake and rattle and get on with the roll. However, just as you’re getting all relaxed and comfortable there will be a surprise roundabout that Stella hasn’t been told about. They seem to be adding lots of roundabouts which is a shame since the French seem to have no idea about how to go round them. I was taught to get in the left lane to turn left and the right lane to go right but you can choose whichever lane takes your fancy and if you can be bothered you can indicate when you’re leaving it. Luckily there isn’t a lot of traffic about, if it was like the A12 there would be tailbacks miles long and the A12 doesn’t need roundabouts to do tailbacks.
If there isn’t a roundabout available the French will just stick a village either side of the road, reduce the road to one lane and put speed bumps in, small ones to slow you down to 30mph and big “cupboard shakers” to slow you down to 20mph.
We went for a little walk around the town following the marked out trail. The full trail was 14km but we may have skipped a little bit 🙂 On the way back we stopped in the bakers and found this excellent example of crust, not just any old crust, this is €1.75 worth of finest cereals, twice the cost of your boring old baguette crust and twice as hard.
We decided to have our French lunch on the lawn outside Frankie, you can just see him through the trees. Luckily we weren’t too far from home when we needed sharper implements to open our loaf.
The crust was exceedingly hard but inside was something rather pleasant and almost worth admiring. After lunch we went for a short bike ride, it would have been longer but Lucy managed to direct us into a no through road.
Next morning we woke up rather early. All of your clocks went back but of course being in France ours didn’t. Actually they did as well but silly old me thought that they didn’t and “corrected” all of our clocks so we ended getting up at 7am, we were on the road by 8.30am driving through a thick wall of fog to our next destination, Vendome.
Stella did her usual trick but sending us round and round the town in ever decreasing to circles until we get to the aire. We were hoping to spend the day in Verdonne but the aire looked slightly uninviting and the circus was on the park behind us. We’d spent the night next to a circus before and it wasn’t going to happen a second time so we decided to park up, look round and move on. As we were preparing our lunch bag the circus started moving out.
I’ve now seen my next unit, a lovely fifth wheeler with two trailers.
Please don’t show this picture to Denis Davis, we don’t want him getting any ideas 🙂
This one has got a Mercedes on the back trailer. One thing is for certain, they don’t have a Stella helping them get out of town!
It was still foggy as we went into town and somehow I got tricked into entering another church.
This is Lucy re-enacting the first time she tricked me into going into a church!
It was rather pretty inside and the fine stone work looked very delicate.
The church is undergoing restoration which was rather more sympathetic that the “improvements” being made to Chartres cathedral.
A second money saving tip for the lads. Go shopping in France on a Monday. They are all shut. We looked in one shop window and the opening times were on a board, Tuesday to Saturday open 10am to noon and then 2pm till 5pm. 25 hours a week anyone?
By lunch time the sun had finally burnt away the fog and we had a lovely lunch in the park next to the river. Vendome was OK, not as good as the guide book suggested so we decided to move on but only after I had managed to snaffle some more free wifi and upload the last two blogs. We’ve done rather well with the wifi, we have a BT FON box at home which was £35ish and it lets us log into SFR WiFi FON for free.
We’ve ended up at a free aire in Montoire sur Loir. You can get 10 units on and the first one there gets the only free electric point, we were second!
Bikes off the back and we go off for another bike ride, not for long as Lucy’s legs were aching after yesterdays bike ride and walk. She was so worn out that we had to stop in a bar for refreshments.
When we got back to the aire the sun was shining, not a cloud in the sky so we took our kindles over to the park bench with a glass of wine and started reading. The guy in the first motorhome arrived back and came over asking me some questions and I thought he was about to leave but he was offering me the use of his “double socket” for the electric. He spoke no English, my French is rather poor but I did get the gist of what he was saying once he had repeated himself, I think I just need to listen to more French being spoken and “acclimatise” myself to the sounds.
PS – If you have any problems trying to register on the site for updates can you email me and let me know, I’ll get my tame computer wizard to investigate.
Please put the aire number in then we can follow in the book 🙂
Hi Markie and Loo.
Really enjoying your blog, and the pictures are superb. Make me want to come back again next year and do it all again, but slowly. Keep well
Denzil
One thing I’m getting jealous about… French lunches!
Definitely not missing you or getting jealous about any of the other stuff. :/
X
What a wonderful journey this is turning out to be.
Thank you Mark and Lucy great stuff.
You will be both so fit with all that biking.
Roundabouts – noticed the comments…strictly avoid the Etoile round the Arc de Triomphe in Paris…once you get in…you can never get out.
http://europeantrips.org/arc-de-triomphe-de-letoile.html
Giorgio