The only Brits abroad

Of course we're not. On Facebook, Kathy Alyward, a fellow aficionado of extended travel, posted from high up in the Pyrenees. Clearly, we are not alone. Nevertheless, judging from our own experience travelling 800 miles south through France, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland we have not seen one British vehicle apart from a lone Eddy Stobart truck heading from Charleroi towards the channel ports as we sped in the opposite direction.

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Anyway, back to the 'Deutschland voll' problem. Yesterday morning, straight after breakfast we rang around a dozen or so campsites seeking to plot a route south to Italy that offered some guarantee that we would have somewhere safe to sleep each night. It soon became clear this was going to prove a trickier proposition that we had imagined. Half the places simply did not pick-up - already booked solid we presumed. None of the places around Bodensee that answered had space, similarly, every campsite in the vicinity of the Black Forest was full. Eventually we came across a place a few kilometres north af Basel with a pitch to spare. We booked it and headed there.

As Gill said, we need to seek out the unfashionable places in Germany as they will be quieter. Where we stayed last night, a small site on the outskirts of Bamlach is never going to attract a gushing entry in Lonely Planet. However, the village, spread over a vine-clad hillside in rolling country between the Black Forest and the Swiss border, was pretty, the site itself had views across the Rhine valley towards the Vosges, and the owners were friendly and accommodating. Finally we felt more relaxed, our trip feeling more of an adventure than an ordeal.

What had been worrying us is that the sites on Elba would be as busy as those in Germany and we might struggle to book anywhere for a week or two's R&R by the Med - which was our plan. Gill phoned ahead to Rosselba le Palme, the receptionist assured her 'no need to book, lots of spaces'. We needed to slow down, having covered almost 900 miles in four days, way over our preferred maximum of 150 miles in a day. German autobahns are frenetic, I was feeling frazzled. We took the opportunity to book two sites that would get us to the Med, two nights by Lake Lugano in Ticino, southern Switzerland's Italian speaking canton, then two nights in Dieva Marina on the Ligurian Riviera. It's a plan!