Well it’s the first big test of the T5, traveling aboard
well France anyway!
Living in Poole you would think we would take the Poole crossing to France! Until we saw the prices ouch! The Portsmouth to Le Havre crossing was over £100 cheaper, so that was the route we took - a bit of a convoy with Clare’s parents also making a trip in their Fiat Ducato camper. The crossing went well with a couple of beers in us. The beds on the LD ferry were built for small people so Clare’s mum was fine but at 6FT I found it a bit of a challenge. We docked at 8am which was great and left us the whole day to get to Le Dorat by tea time. I know that your thinking the travel time should only be about 4 hours, why would you be budgeting all day to get there! Well we wanted to see as much of the country as you can and not driving at 100Mph down the motorways but chose to use the local roads so we can stop off at a number of Aires to have a biscuit and something to drink. All sounding great until I powered up TOMTOM or as I have now named it CRAPCRAP! So we ditched it and started to use the good old paper maps, within no time we were back on route checking out some of the best views anywhere. Our first stop was “Aire du Pont de Brotonne” it had toilets and a place to park and have a coffee - nice!
By tea time, we have arrived in Le Dorat but the campsite is only maned from 18:00-17:30 all other times you must go to the local tourist office located in the town centre, so we parked up in the sister in laws drive until the next day. The weather was great in the 30c’s no need for the heater here!
Thenext day we popped over to the camp site to book in and what a lovely campsite it was with only one other camper on it and as for the price it worked our to be 7 ish euros a night with hookup and some of the pitches were 40 foot in size I haven’t seen anything like this in England.
(check out the size of the pitch 40 foot! )
The awning went up and the satellite was put up and aligned in least than 5mins (to my surprise! I was a bit worried if it would work!) we did have ants but after we put down some powered the problem was fix.
Time to check out the hook up with the adapter!
The showers block was clean but they were for both sexes (no sign at the front and both male and female at the back!). It contained two toilets and a shower - one at the front and one at the back.
We spent 7 days here checking out the local area
We then started on the big trip back we decided to take 2 days to drive to Le Havre stopping off at lots of Aires to check them out some were good and some were bad so always check them out first.
We made it to the ferry with plenty of time and back to sunny England!
For good Aires check out this book....
https://www.vicarious-shop.com/All-the-Aires-France-3rd-edition.html