Provence at last !

So here we are, our home away from home!  It's great to be here at last, after the months of planning.

But first, a quick resume of the events since Christmas:

Christmas in England for the first time in 20 years, with my parents, brother Mark and his partner Amber, was great.  Certainly not a white Christmas, and in fact I was in a T-shirt for most of the day it was so mild.  The usual present opening, eating and drinking etc.  Lovely to just have time with family.

Boxing Day was a bit more full on, with my cousin Angela and her family, plus Amber's parents over for the day.  We headed out to view that strange English custom of Morris dancing, conveniently located in a pub car park!  Glasses of hot mulled cider made the proceedings that much more entertaining - I'll let the pictures do the talking!

The little girl in the photo below kept her hat on throughout the whole show, which included a dance involving the children - I'm sure she couldn't see a thing, but that wasn't going to stop her audience participation!

Enough of strange men waving hankys and beating each other with sticks whilst wearing pheasant feathers on their heads....it was time to leave the country!

We took the car on the Portsmouth to Caen ferry, with some concern from me about the "strong gale force winds" forecast. 

The other concern was whether Lew's bike would fit on the ferry - we were 20cm above the 2m60 head clearance allowance for bikes on the roof - but as you can see, we needn't have worried.

 Armed with double strength travel pills and sea bands, the first brain teaser was how to assemble the beds in the cabin - we had a night crossing from 10pm to 6.45am.  The lower bunk was a fairly obvious conversion of the couch, but it took a while before we realised the top bunk pulled down out of the ceiling.  A pretty impressive cabin really, considering there were 800 of them on board - we had our own bathroom with shower, and even Lew could fit into his bunk.

As expected, Lew slept the whole night, and I didn't.  Thankfully it wasn't nearly as rough as expected, so I got through it without losing my dinner.
Yes I slept like a log and was able to fully stretch out.  The constant hum of the engines was like taking a sleeping pill.  We were woken at 5.45am (French time) by classical music gradually increasing in volume followed by less soothing announcements in French and Anglais reminding us that breakfast was served and that we had not much time to get ready to disembark.  The shower was also very good.

And so we're in France!! 

We decided to use the motorways/autoroutes/peage as, although you have to pay, they are very quiet, quick, and don't involve any decision-making as there aren't any roundabouts or intersections to worry about which side of the road you should be on!  The only taxing part are the "gares de peage"  - the toll gates you have to drive through every now and then and either take a ticket for the next section of motorway, or pay for the section you've just been on.  The only problem was, they are un-manned, and automatically detect the size of your vehicle: cars take a ticket down low, trucks take a ticket from much higher up the machine.  You can see what's coming can't you?!  The machines kept detecting the bikes on the roof of the car, and poking out a ticket higher up!  Knowing that trucks have to pay more on the motorways, we didn't want to get conned into paying more, so I hit the big red button for help "assistance" and waited for a real person to talk to!!  We had to sit there for a minute or two first while I rehearsed in my best French exactly what I was going to say, hopefully in my most authoritative indignant French voice!  Luckily the person somewhere in the cloud understood me, and explained it was all OK and we wouldn't get charged more - not sure how they worked it out, but they were correct, we didn't get charged more than we should have.  So all was good for the next 1300 kilometres.

We don't have any photos of the peage because there was no time to be taking photos and needed to consider the ticket coming out about 2m above us!!  They are basically a toll gate with options to pay by card or cash.  Some French people obviously have a peage "ticket" because there were entry points for "t" holders.

We had a couple of nights with Richard and Antoinette Fagge, distant relatives of Lew, who were very welcoming and hospitable, taking us out for a walk on the beach, cooking us delicious meals and answering all our questions about life in France.
Richard is apparently my 3rd cousin once removed - pretty distant but treated us like royalty.  

Some observations about driving in France:  There is very little traffic at this time of the year (about the same as South Island and 1/10th of the UK), they are pretty considerate about letting you join the flow of traffic, they tend to drive very, very close behind the car in front and if they want to pass they may as well be hitting the bumper and on country roads they drive down the middle or on the wrong side.  They give a wide berth to cyclists and one person gave us so much room that they were completely on the wrong side of the road on a blind corner.  Fortunately no-one was coming the other way!

I'll finish with the view from the bathroom window this morning; a reasonable frost, but not enough to ice up the swimming pool!  We'll fill you in on the first week's activities next time....