Status-Q

Well, at 1am on Saturday morning, we arrived home from our 'Tour de France' in the campervan. We had planned to travel for a bit longer, but having stayed in 15 different places for our first 17 nights, we were in danger of overload and so decided to turn for home and save some of the other places for a future trip! One of the joys of campervan travel, and especially in France, and even more so in France outside the peak season, is that you don't need to book anywhere in advance, and so can make the trip up as you go along, and change it on a whim. But we had a lovely time and clocked up nearly 2000 miles on the lovely, smooth, quiet French roads.

Some of our destinations were chosen for literary reasons. We love Neville Shute, and wanted to see Brest, Douarnenez, and the submarine pens at Lorient, mostly because they feature in his books. A fondness for Alexendre Dumas, and the references in The Three Musketeers to the Isle de Ré, and the siege of La Rochelle, added those locations to the list. As a fan of Shakespeare's Henry V, I am still looking forward to a future visit to Agincourt, but we did go once more unto the breach, dear friends, in Harfleur: it's now a roundabout, called La Brèque, at the place where the breach in the old city wall used to be!

We visited harbours and grottos, lighthouses and cathedrals, beaches and Roman villas. We stayed mostly on campsites, but sometimes at an Aire de Camping-Car, which, for the uninitiated, is a parking area where a local authority allows you to stay overnight, often for free. There are huge numbers of these in France, often in small villages, and they encourage visitors to visit local shops and restaurants. We now have warm fuzzy feelings about a little village named Locmaria-Plouzané, in the Finisterre region, of which we would otherwise have been completely ignorant, simply because they kindly let us pass a very peaceful night here, a short walk from the village centre:

Very few British authorities are this enlightened, though CAMpRA, the Campaign for Real Aires, is working to get more aire-like facilities in the UK, and we've stayed on a couple of delightful ones.

Some French aires provide a few more services and require modest payment. Some are privately owned: we stayed at a lovely one in the Dordogne that was surrounded by a wire mesh fence with a sliding gate, and the owners asked us to make sure it was closed at night. I was surprised... I looked around at the rolling farmland and thought it didn't look like a high-crime area. No, no, they explained, the gate was to keep any local wild boar out so we weren't disturbed in the night...

We spent one night, for free, in a vineyard, courtesy of the France Passion scheme.

Complete, of course, with a small chateau...

And in Honfleur we stayed in what was basically a large car park... but which was absolutely peaceful at night, provided an electric hook-up, and was 5 minutes' walk from the wonderful old harbour.

For those contemplating the relative comforts of a car park and a hotel room, it must be admitted that our ensuite facilities in the van are somewhat compact. But we also have the benefit of sleeping each night in our own bed, with our own pillows and duvet, and our clothes conveniently in the cupboards without a suitcase in sight.

Our range of activities was a little constrained on this trip by the presence of Betsy, our five-month old puppy. At one point we came back to the van to find she'd realised the view was better from Rose's seat than from the floor. Bother. I fear this means we'll now have to purchase some seat covers...

Anyway, we're now back, and have tamed the jungle that just three weeks ago was our nicely-mown garden, so I can soon get round to editing my many hours of video footage into a YouTube video, which I do, primarily, to help me relive the trip and remember it for longer!

This morning, we visited Kermorvan Lighthouse, just across the river from the delightful Le Conquet.

This is the most westerly point of mainland France, on a delightful headland, and definitely worth a visit, especially if you're lucky enough to get the kind of weather we had today.

By the way, from here to the Scilly Isles is a little over 100 miles. How do I know this without looking it up?

Well, slightly off to the right (not visible in this photo) we could just see another lighthouse on the horizon: on the island of Ushant, about 15 miles offshore.

And as all good sailors know, when you've had to say farewell and adieu to those fair Spanish ladies, adieu and farewell to those ladies of Spain, because you're under orders for to sail to old England, then you'll come past this point on the way.

You'll probably rant and you'll roar, like true British sailors, and you'll rant and you'll roar all on the salt seas, 'til at last you strike soundings in the channel of old England (and Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues).

We've just returned from a somewhat spontaneous tour of northern England in our little campervan, which we cunningly timed to coincide with the unexpected arrival of Storm Amy. As friends and family sent us links to the orange weather warnings, we looked in vain for campsites named something like 'Sheltered Glade', and instead always found ourselves in places whose names contained phrases like 'sea view' or 'high moor'!

But all was well, and we had a splendid time despite the weather, which calmed down after our first few days. One of the joys of making such trips out of season and during school terms is that you can very much play it by ear: we often left one location in the morning without being entirely sure where we were staying that night, and in the end we had a good mix, from pub car parks, to peaceful fields, to fully-equipped campsites.

In all, we slept in eight different places over nine nights, and yet always in our own comfortable bed, with our own pillows, under our own warm duvet. A good campervan is a marvellous thing.

We visited grand houses...

...and rugged castles.

We might have lunch at sea level on one day...

and at Britain's highest pub on another.

We admired the colours of Teesdale waterfalls...

and of Burne-Jones windows.

We also did some more touristy things. Being fans of James Herriot, we enjoyed a visit to the lovely little village of Askrigg, one of whose prominent buildings was used as 'Skeldale House' in the original BBC TV series of All Creatures Great and Small.

And, though it sounds a little corny, the World of James Herriot museum in Thirsk is exceedingly good, and well worth a visit if you know the stories.

So now, after rural picnics and fine restaurants, art galleries and abbeys, motorways and farm tracks, big cities and picturesque villages...

...we are now back home in a very flat East Anglia, which does seem, now I think of it, to have rather a shortage of castles and waterfalls.

I'm already looking forward to the next trip.

Back in late February, while Rose was away, Tilly (may she rest in peace) and I departed on one of our campervan trips. As is often the case when I'm doing these out-of-season jaunts, I set off not really knowing where I would end up, my itinerary being driven partly by the weather forecast, and partly just by a desire to see places I'd heard of but never visited before.

It ended up being a tour mostly of north-east England and south-west Scotland, and I captured rather a lot of video footage over the two-week trip, which I've finally managed to edit into something watchable! Watchable for me, anyway: I do this mostly to give me a chance to relive the experience many times over, and I also make the videos available just in case they're also of interest to others.

The first part of that certainly works very well: the long reviewing and editing process means I have detailed memories of several of my past trips where there would otherwise be just a vague, hazy recollection. (It also means that the videos are rather longer than if I were making them for someone else!)

But as for the second part -- will others watch them too? -- well, I appreciate that there are many people, probably most people, for whom the idea of watching extended video footage of other people's holidays may be a bizarre concept, but there are also a surprising number who do get enjoyment from this kind of thing... especially other campervan & motorhome owners who might be looking for places to visit or stay on their travels.

Over the years I have built up an extensive set of custom lists on Google Maps with titles like 'Want to go' and 'Overnight stop?', which have proved very handy when planning any kind of trip, and many of the little markers they contain have come from watching others' videos and thinking, "Oooh. That looks rather good...Let me just mark that...".

Anyway, I've now uploaded the first few episodes to a YouTube playlist called Up North & Down South, and the remainder will follow over the next couple of days, in the hope that, as someone once said, "people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like".

First episode here.

I'm somewhat embarrassed to think of the number of miles I've driven in Europe without fully understanding the Priorité à droite rules -- that's the French name, at least, though other countries have something similar. This means you should often give way to traffic simply because it's coming from the right, even if, say, you're on a larger road and other vehicles are approaching from a smaller road on your right.

When is this the case? This video is a good and detailed explanation, and is valuable viewing for anyone visiting France from the UK or US:

(Direct YouTube link)

It's also worth noting that the signs showing the name of a village, as you enter it, may also contain clues as to what is expected of you.

It used to be the case, I believe, that most French roundabouts also worked this way: when you were on the roundabout, you still had to give way to traffic approaching from the right. They changed this, though -- I remember big signs when visiting in my youth that said 'Vous n'avez pas la priorité!' as you approached the roundabout -- so I believe all French rond-points work the same way as the UK, now - but do post comments if I'm wrong!

You can be confident that you are no longer in land-locked Cambridgeshire...

when you pop to the nearest recycling bins, and there are three: one for glass, one for aluminium, and one for fishing nets.

I've spent the last week or so sailing around the Aegean in my friend Philip's 32-foot boat. I've done this once before, and he was kind enough to invite me back for a second visit. It was once again a wonderful trip, admittedly involving, at times, some sweaty cramped conditions and some rather primitive harbourside sanitation, but any such drawbacks were massively outweighed by the adventure, education and cameraderie as we explored parts of the Dodecanese and Cyclades islands.

I will remember some very fine dining and drinking.

Some stunning views, especially around the amazing volcanic caldera that is Santorini,

Dolphins leaping and playing under our bows:

(Thanks to Pilgrim Beart for the clip)

Some adventurous sailing on the high seas -- sometimes more adventurous than we wanted!

Archaeological sites with intact multi-storey houses more than twice as old as the Old Testament.

Plunging into warm seas from the back of the boat before breakfast, and again before bed.

Labyrinthine three-dimensional hillside towns with barely a straight line to be found.

And the millennium-spanning delight of reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Iliad, on my Kindle, recently recharged by solar panels, while enjoying the breeze blowing off the sparkling blue sea.

And now I'm home, and I need to mow the lawn before it starts raining.

I've been driving an electric car for about a decade now, but because we also have a fossil-burning campervan, I do still occasionally need to visit one of those dirty, smelly, legacy refuelling stations, so...

If you use a site like PetrolPrices.com, you can find out roughly how much fuel costs at the various petrol stations near you.

This is handy. But it's not really what you want to know, is it?

You actually want to know whether it's worth driving 10 extra miles to fill up your tank at a cheaper location, given the extra time and distance involved and the fact that your tank is already half-full at present. It's not always easy to translate a potential saving of 2.5p per litre into a number that means very much. Will it, for example, help pay off your mortgage, or just let you buy an extra chocolate biscuit when you get there?

So, in a burst of enthusiasm this morning, I threw together a little calculator to help with the maths:

Are you being a fuel fool?

Feedback and bug reports welcome!

How very strange to wake this morning thinking about Starmer and Trump - as Churchill and... Neville Chamberlain.

I'm sorry Neville, you really didn't deserve that!

I didn't think about either of them for long, though, because I'm in my campervan looking at Lindisfarne (just visible in the background), where I'll be heading after breakfast, when the tide falls low enough to expose the causeway.

The bed is across the back of the van, which meant that I could quite literally open the window and look out at this view without my head leaving the pillow.

Peace for the time being, at least. And the news is more encouraging this morning too.

It's easy for those of us who passed their UK driving test a long time ago to forget that the Highway Code is not a static document: it is updated from time to time and old drivers need to know about the changes as well as young ones.

For example, I didn't know about all these changes in 2022, mostly to do with the interactions between different types of road users: drivers, cyclists, pedestrians and horse riders. Did you? They're quite important.

I very seldom use the railways in the UK any more, though I did make two short one-way train journeys in 2023. The first was to collect our campervan from the dealer, and the second was when Rose, Tilly and I took our inflatable kayak from the little station at Bures one stop up the line to Sudbury, and then paddled back down the River Stour to where we'd left the car in the station car park. That was fun. They do have their uses for one-way journeys.

But I don't think I went on a train at all in 2024. (Oh, actually, wait a sec... none in the UK: there were a couple of trips on the Athens metro.) I do quite like trains as a theoretical concept, and use them when I'm in other parts of the world, but the reality here in the UK is that, unless you're unfortunate enough to live in London, driving is generally much more comfortable, more reliable, usually quicker, and always much cheaper than going by rail, so there are very few circumstances when I'd choose to go by train. Even the obvious advantage that you can read on the train is now significantly diminished by having Audible in my car.

And before anyone points out the green credentials of rail travel, it's less clear-cut than you might think. This page suggests that even if you include all the CO2 used in manufacture, the carbon footprint of two people travelling in an EV will work out at 90g/person/mile; very similar to the 80g/person/mile of a standard-class UK train seat, and way better than a first-class seat. If there are more than two of you in the car, you can feel especially virtuous, as well as saving lots of money. This UK government report suggests that EVs and trains have broadly the same emissions if there are only 1.6 people in the car.

There was a brief period in the past when I worked in London for a few weeks, but I quickly realised that life is not a rehearsal, you only go around once, and spending any significant part of one's all-too-limited time on a commuter train was sheer madness! But I've found that as long I only use the railways for unusual trips at off-peak periods, or on holidays, I can maintain a nostalgic fondness for them. (And if you're ever able to take all that money you save over the years by not going on trains and blow it all on one ticket on the Orient Express to Venice, I can definitely recommend the experience!)

All of which is a rather long introduction to the fact that I do still find this live train map from SignalBox to be rather pleasing! You can sit comfortably at home, picture all those trains rushing in around the country, and feel some sympathy (or perhaps schadenfreude!) for those whose icons are not green.