Four hops then home

Ends of journeys are unsettling. It is difficult not to perceive them as some sort of downward trajectory. If stories have an arc, then so do journeys. I am reminded of the final few lines of Larkin's Whisun Weddings:

I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

He really is the master of quiet despondency, which is how the end of a journey feels, I think. Gill cannot be doing with this fanciful stuff. Instead she has coined a succinct term for the feeling - 'endishness'. It encapsulates neatly in one word something that took Mr. Larkin 12 intricate lines to say.

Sadly France has become the unintentional victim of 'endishness' because more often than not it is our route home. The temptation is to stay in the south for as long as possible then dash through France with a Dover deadline in mind. This results in  using familiar routes that avoid tolls, but are quick, over-nighting in places that we know have good facilities and are convenient. So despite hundreds of visits to France  parts of the country remain unfamiliar, particularly many of its cities: Dijon, Geneva, Lyon, Poitier, Nantes, Anger, Limoges, Poitier, Strasboug are among the many places we have sped past. The same is true of the countryside, parts of the Auvergne, the Chartreuse and l'Ecrin, and Ile de France are all blanks on our inner map. It would be nice to be able to say this time we made a concerted effort to change and we found a new, interesting route home. We didn't, endishness triumphed, four hops then home - Stenay, Haybes, Bavey, Arques, Buxton.

Stenay

The route north from Turckheim was straightforward - over the Vosges via the Col de Bonhomme, then northwards following the valley of the Meuse. We have in the past been very rude about the Vosges, drawing parallels between its straggling villages and Royston Vesey. We speculated whether the fact that the area has become to symbolise the face of  France at its most run-down, dreary and deprived is the result of visiting mainly in March in drizzle. Today under sunny skies the countryside was lovely but the towns and villages still looked like a set from a Gallic version of 'League of Gentlemen'. There appeared to have been a concerted effort by the local Mairies to 'brighten-up' the place. This consisted in the main of applying the same day-glo paint noted on the facades of the houses in the nearby wine villages to various items of street furniture - planters in the main. It did  contrast startlingly with dreariness of the buildings; however the effect was to highlight the desolation rather than relieve it.

Now we were heading north following the valley of the Moselle. At Nancy the river turns left heading for Germany. We drove staight on, across a low ridge and into the watershed of the Meuse, following signs for Verdun. It's a gentle, pastoral landscape of broad horizons and big skies. Nearing Verdun we crossed series of low ridges. It was the struggle to command these ridges that resulted in almost one million casualties in 1916. The Battle of Verdun was possibly the most costly single military encounter in human history. Like in the Somme region, military cemeteries line the road. It's a sad prospect. We are at best ambivalent about the paraphernalia and rhetoric of commemoration. It seems to us that the focus on 'sacrifice' and 'bravery', the military bands and uniforms that accompany such ceremonies, normalise and give credence to war. There are no winners or losers in a war, soldiers are as much victims of it as civilians. We do need to remember, but in such a way that celebrates and develops peace and conflict resolution. The iconography of remembrance - poppies et al -sentimentalises war, that in itself is a kind of trivialising acceptance.

As well as the official cemeteries local villages were advertising a variety of re-enactment events. I am not ambivalent at all about military re-enactment. To me it is a kind of historical pornography, a  puerile, cartoon version of real events designed to showcase an alluring fantasy - 'bang bang, you're dead!' (editing in later - this post today on Motorhome Adventures sums up the point - why would anyone want to do this as a leisure activity - with kids?)

We were pleased to drive on beyond the shadow of war. Stenay, our end point, has a somewhat grandiosely titled museum of its own, 'Le Musée Européen de la Bière'. We visited it the last time we were here. I like the place because it celebrates the innocuous and the mundane, but in this case the intoxicatingly so. One way of celebrating peace is to give greater credence to everyday human existence, the things that sustain and celebrate our 'mortal span'. No time for a second visit. another time, I am owed a beer at the beer museum as the last time I was there I was on medication that reacted badly with alcohol.

Stenay is a great place to stop. The aire is run by the capitanerie by some locks on the Meuse. Places like this make motorhome travel so simple. It's not surprising we make a bee-line for these places. France is not always charming, but this evening it was, from the delightful young woman managing the place to the pleasant waterside stroll after dinner.

Haybes

Gradually France's Camping Municipal's are being sold off by local Mairies. Nevertheless,  2,800 of them still remain. They do feel like a blast from the past, a relic of mid 20th century collectivism struggling-on into the hyper-personalised, individualistic now. One site which lists them describes the them like this:

"Going on a holiday in a municipal campsite is a bit of a trip back in time: finding France in the 50s, 60s, 70s ... That kind of a lazy, nonchalant post-war era, or conviviality, simplicity, human relationships at the heart of social life."

At best they provide a cheap, serviceable place to stay, clean and well maintained; at worst they provide a cheap place to stay... Haybes falls into the 'best' category, well mainly, with the bonus of being right by the river Meuse in the middle of the most picturesque section of the French Ardennes gorge. The Meuse cycle path runs right by the campsite too. In all but one aspect the place is an excellent place to stop for one or two nights.

What is the downside? That would be the WC chemique, the worst designed I have ever come across. I cannot even bring myself to explain the issue in detail...

Bavay

Free Aire Municipals - the other thing that makes moho travel in France so easy. Bavay's aire is free. It has minimal facilities, but it is peaceful at night and a short walk through a pleasant park to the town centre with good local shops. I guess we would never have come this way but for the fact it is only a couple of kilometres from Gill's sister's place. We had a good catch-up with family news and a quick visit to Belgium for a woodland walk followed by a meal outside in the garden.

The most unusual aspect of the walk was that a nearby community set-up to support adults with learning difficulties had an open day. In particular, as well as crafts and pottery for sale, the gardens were free to visit. They were somewhat strange, slightly surreal and a tad un-nerving. They reminded me a little of the Dali Museum, or at least a Belgian version of it. It is no co-incidence that Belgian artists figured strongly in the movement - particularly Magritte, and the 'magic realist' Paul Delvaux.

Arques

It's too far to drive to Calais and then all the way home from Bavay. We have experimented with all kinds of variations - using a stop-off in Kent, the aires at Wissant or Bergues, but on the last two trips we have parked in the aire outside the Camping Municipal at Arques, near St. Omer. Again a simple place, which only costs 7 euros, situated prettily next to a fishing lake, .The motorhome service point is well designed too and makes 'emptying the tanks' simple; a boon, if like us you have to put the van straight into storage when you get back.

Home

By our standards six weeks is not a long trip. Long enough to make the normality of everyday England look a tad strange. These are not good times, things are beginning to look shabby and run-down after years of self imposed austerity. Many people too look a bit dishevelled, ill or sad. True, motorway services are probably not the best places to base sweeping generalisations - but they are used by a cross-section of the population. People in general looked a bit miserable.

Home- why is the weather alway overcast as we near Buxton. I cannot recall arriving back on a nice sunny day that would tempt you to think, 'it's nice to be back'.

Instead the lawn looked like a meadow! It took me two days of hard graft to get from this:

to this:

Time to resume our boring middle class existence. Until our youngest is a bit more settled and has found work it is difficult to make plans for an autumn trip, well we can make plans, realising them may be a tad trickier.

Back to France (guerrilla herb gardening}.

We spent the last two days in Turckheim, the renowned Alsace wine village a few kilometres from Colmar. Camping Medieval, a short stroll from the village centre, is an ex-municipal which has been recently re-developed. It is as good a place to stay as anywhere we have been, large pitches, nice view of the vineyards, excellent sanitary block, well designed motorhome service point - perfecto!

The motorhome blogger Maggie Bevis rails about the variable quality of sites and aires. She is right, there is no relationship whatsoever between quality and price. The last place we stayed, Camping Cowpat in Switzerland charged €20 per night for facilities that were barely sanitary. Here, with clean, well designed facilities, a friendly welcoming receptionist and a lovely position, the nightly rate is only €15. 

As well as having a great view of the terraced vineyards and being a short stroll from Turckheim's old streets the site is surrounded by storks nests. Some are perched precariously on pylons and WiFi masts, others occupy poles with baskets on top, specially designed to attract the storks. They remind me of pelicans a little, not just because of their big beaks, but because when  grounded they look awkward and slightly comical. However, in flight they are magnificent. Only then do you appreciate their size. They look prehistoric, reminiscent of pterodactyls. Like many birds they use sound to delineate territory. Storks do this by snapping their beaks making a loud clicking noise. Happily, they don't seem to continue this after dark.

We arrived in Turckheim in the early afternoon. I suppose we could have opted to get the bus to nearby Colmar. We remembered it as having an attractive medieval centre and flower decked balconies overlooking narrow canals. In the end we opted to walk into Turckheim itself. I wondered if it was the village we stopped at in 2000 on the way to Garda. I have some holiday video of somewhere in Alsace all decked out with Easter garlands with fancy cakes in the patisserie windows. As soon as we approached the Porte de Munster, the east gate into the old walled village, I recognised it, though it had changed in a rather unusual way.

The architecture of Alsace's villages is similar to those over border in the Black Forest - medieval  tall timber framed houses infilled with colour washed stucco. It all looks a bit Hansel and Gretel. In the pictures of our previous visit here though the houses were brightly coloured, they were not garish. These days the pinks, mint greens, buttercup yellows and tangerines are positively luminescent, an effect, one supposes of advances in day-glo technology that also brought us one of the defining symbols of our age - the hi-res jacket. Many streets in Turckheim look ineptly photoshopped for real with the saturation set on 150%.

I wondered about this on-line connection. In the same way tourist hotspots are beginning to install five foot high sculpted letters next to a heart - "I LOVE WHEREVER" in order to promote themselves in selfies, perhaps the next stage is to give the actual buildings a makeover so they appear 'ready photoshopped' and startlingly photogenic. It is all a bit dis-spiriting really.

Nevertheless, Turckheim remains an interesting town, almost a suburb of Colmar, which means it has a clutch of gaunt abandoned factories in the outskirts. The 'Cave' too is massive and industrial looking. For all the cutesy houses the place produces excellent wine on an industrial scale for the world market. That gives the town a life and vibrancy that more than compensates for the odd mass tourism blooper.

The campsite reception had a table full of brochures advertising local attractions. One listed a local walk - 2hrs through the hillside vineyards that overlook the town. We debated whether to unload the bikes and pedal to a nearby village or take the walk. I am pleased we chose the latter. The weather cleared, became almost too hot, slowing us down enough to appreciate the views across the terraces towards the Vosges to the north and southwards beyond Colmar, across the broad plain of the Rhine valley towards the misty outline of the Black Forest.

The footpath returned us to the opposite end of Turckheim to where the campsite is situated. The area is just as ancient, particularly the Rue de Vignerons, which as the name suggests, is full of old half timbered wine grower and merchants houses and storage barns. This end of town was much less frequented by tourists. Nevertheless the houses were still daubed in day-glo - which puts the kibosh somewhat on my previous theory about it being a tourism related trend. Perhaps its simply a cultural change, a matter of fashion. Maybe garish is the new pastel.

Day-glo houses are not the only kitch feature around here - these are some very odd tableaux on the balconies too...

This place has been a great stop-over. Originally we planned to stay at the free aire at nearby Kayserberg, another of the areas famed medieval wine villages. It too is beautiful, but we needed a two day stopover to clean the van and do some laundry. Camping Medieval has great facilities and one of the best service points I have seen. It is inexpensive - 15 euros - in a great position, I am sure we will use it again.

We did leave the place a small gratuity. Gill's portable herb garden proved a minor Instagram hit over the past few weeks. Sadly the mint plant bought at Morrison's before we left is looking a bit straggly. What it needs is some ptoper soil and a bit more natural sunshine - so we planted in the hedge at the side of the pitch, where hopefully it will thrive and be well used by others.

The on-board portable herb box

Now minus a mint plant donated to Camping Medieval, pitch 115

Across the Alps (morning moo in the loo).

We expected a rainy day in the mountains. It turned out considerably worse than anticipated. The day started well enough. We survived the Milan tangentiale without incident, then turned north towards Chiasso and Switzerland. It had been drizzly all morning, now it began to pour. As we climbed towards the mountains we drove into a thunderstorm. The rain became torrential, cars pulled off onto the hard shoulder, squeezed together, sheltering beneath flyovers.

Some of us soldiered on, particularly the trucks and other commercial vehicles, but the speed of the traffic slowed to under 50kph. At first I thought the intensity of the rain had affected the engine, but it was simply the combination of the steady gradient upwards and driving into the wall of water slowed us up. It's in these circumstances that you realise that a 2.3 diesel engine is only just powerful enough to power a 7m motorhome, especially one loaded to capacity like ours.

The storm remained intense for half on hour. As we passed Como and neared the Swiss border the sky brightened a little and the rained eased into a steady downpour. At Chiasso we pulled into the customs bay, handed the unsmiling official €40; she gave us a Swiss annual motorway pass in return. The notes about for attaching it to the windscreen were very precise and included a specific instruction not to affix it using lip balm. Is this something people do?

Our plan had been to stay at an Asci site at Cugnasco near Locarno, but it was still raining steadily as we approached the junction. We decided to push on through the San Gottardo tunnel as the weather forecast for the northern side of the Alps was better. Indeed this turned out to be the case, when we arrived at Altdorf at the foot of Lake Lucerne it was merely drizzling.

We checked out one site on the outskirts of Altdorf but rejected it as it looked to be mainly statics and was located in an industrial area. Instead we headed for a farm site near Meierskappel. It is difficult to know how to describe Campingplatz Gerbe.

Let's try listing a few positives first. It was indeed located on a working dairy farm as the blurb promised. The farm buildings themselves were traditional. In fact so traditional that I became convinced that the barn was the very one featured on on the jacket of my sister's copy of 'Heidi grows up' published in about 1956. The place had everything, an enormous chalet style barn, languorous cud chewing brown cows, perky inquisitive goats. All this would have been delightful but for the fact that the entire farm seemed to have been little improved since then, and the few subsequent developments were distinctly idiosyncratic

Some I photographed: 

Heidi style barn

Pigeon loft camping bungalows

Trojan Horse climbing frame

Shared space sanitary facilities

The latter feature did not involve gender neutral facilities like many campsites today; it was more radical than that, seemingly designed to please only the most committed animal rights activist. The toilets and showers were situated in the big wooden barn sectioned off by a breeze block walk about 2.5 metres high. It sounded as if the cow shed was immediately behind it. Not only were morning ablutions accompanied by alarmingly nearby mooing, but the sanitary block smelled distinctly of manure and was fly infested as you might expect if you unexpectedly found yourself showering in a byre.

The whole business of farm camping is a bit strange when you think of it. Agriculture is an industry, and like many others is a smelly, noisy business. We don't hanker after staying overnight in an oil refinery, biscuit works or fish finger factory. What's different about a farm?

We have driven across Switzerland on many occasions. When it is fine and sunny it is a delghtful place. When the mountains are hidden in mist and cloud you notice how industrialised most of the valleys are. The motorways are busy, narrow laned and constantly under repair. In bad weather you just want to get out of the place; sadly, most times we have visited it has poured. Today was exceptional only to the extent the downpour was unusually torrential.

We followed our usual route north, towards Basel, across the frontier into Germany, a few miles up the autobahn, then over the Rhine across into France heading towards Colmar. It stopped raining, the clouds lifted enough to see the Black Forest on one side of the river and the Vosges on the other. In less than a week we will be home. Endishness is setting in, we began to talk about the trip's highlights rather than anticipating places ahead, a surefire sign of impending journey's end.

Towards to Alps

Our ferry is looming in ten days time. Now the dreaded moment - the long drive north. Our plan - to stop at Lago d'Iseo, one of the smaller Italian lakes, then through Switzerland, up the east of France, then call in to visit Jackie, Gill's sister who lives in Nord Department a few kilometres from the Belgian border. Afterwards - home. 

Having experimented with using trunk roads in Italy on previous trips we have decided to use the autostrada in future. Compared to France the tolls are inexpensive and they have the advantage of being better surfaced than Italy's potholed 'A' roads, and most of the time drivers do go in the direction they are supposed to, not always the case on other roads.

Note to selves - Sunday is a good day to use the autostrada in Italy - almost empty.

We made good progress. The rolling countryside of Emilia Romana is fertile and productive, a mixture of fruit farms, vineyards, bright green pasture and yellow fields of cereal crops. No wonder its cities are famous for their cooking. 

We crossed the Po, then approached Mantua, an unusual city which resembles Middlesborough on its outskirts, but has a glorious ancient centre. No time to linger today however. We sped by Verona following the valley of the Mincio for a while, then skirted the southern shore of Lake Garda. Once again we were on familiar territory. We had three or four great Easter family holidays at Peschiera di Garda; it is impossible to resist the temptation reminisce.

Peschiera...'Do you remember when....'

Travelling by motorway it is not only famous places that become landmarks, mundane things stick in the mind as well. Peschiera's Franke kitchen sink factory was duly noted, as was the impressive Autogrill service area that straddles the autostrada near Brescia. It must have looked ultra modern in the 70s with big porthole windows overlooking the passing traffic. Think Leicester East services re- imagined by Terry Anderson. The other thing that strikes you is the number of factories lining the motorway. It was the same a quarter of a century ago when we first visited. Back then quite a few looked somewhat dilapidated with crumbling brick facades and gaunt concrete frames. Not so now, many of them look brand new and are stylishly designed. Italy's state finances may be a complete mess, but you have to admire its industrial policy. Do we even have one? 

By now we should have had a clear view of the Alps, but they were only faintly visible through the mist. In fact as we drove towards them they seemed to become ever less visible. Then they completely disappeared. I missed the turn off to Iseo and immediately the road disappeared into a series of long tunnels. 

Every so often we would glimpse the lake, now far below is. 'When do you think we might be able to turn around?' Gill wondered. 

'Austria?' I suggested glumly.

In fact after about 15km we found a junction which allowed us to turn around. Still, that's 30kms of needless driving. Camping Quai was right by the lakeside, as the name suggested. First impressions were somewhat negative. The pitches were small and a little muddy, the trees made it gloomy and it was busier than we had anticipated. Furthermore the railway ran right past the perimeter fence. There were positives, it was a short cycle ride into Iseo itself and all the trees meant the entire site teemed with blackbirds. The birdsong was lovely.

We unpacked the bikes and headed into town. It was Sunday, clearly the place was very popular with day-trippers from Brescia and Bergamo. The waterfront cafés were crowded and a late afternoon passiagata was in full swing with people in their 'Sunday best' parading about. It was nice to watch, indeed it was the only thing to watch as the afternoon mist was now gathering into threatening looking clouds; the lake looked dark and the mountains were almost invisible.

It rained heavily overnight. For a short spell in the morning it cleared and the sun appeared. There was a brief but magnificent view of the lake and mountains from the camp terrace. With its woodland settings and delightful birdlife, Camping Quai was certainly more appealing than it first appeared. We had made plans to catch the boat to Monte Isole a village on a large mountainous island in the middle of the lake. It never happened. The cloud base dropped and it rained intermittently for the rest of the day. Between the showers we managed a shopping trip, however my bike does not like the wet and the pedelec kept cutting out.

We consulted a range of on-line weather forecasts keen to believe the most optimistic. None of them were, the general forecast - thunder in the mountains. I think we are in for a wet journey over the Alps.