France, Belgium, Luxembourg & Germany 3 - 26 May 18 - Week 1

"Just one bottle" we said

Thursday 3rd may. We were due to go out to Europe on the following Monday, but the weather forecast was good, we had nothing else on, the van was freshly serviced, habitation checked and MOT'd,  so we thought "lets go now" and so we did. A quick run down to the chunnel in warm sunshine, uneventful crossing, a quick whizz around carrefour in Cite Europe (albeit there were very few bargains to be had) and then off to bed safely parked up in the quite busy aire. We did note that France is becoming hideously expensive now. The fuel is certainly now dearer than the UK and this is not just attributable to the poor exchange rate.

Peruwelz

On Friday we drove down to the nice free aire in Peruwelz in Belgium (free if you don't have power and why would you have power when the sun is delivering masses of free leccy via the solar panel?). The Belgian roads still haven't improved and it was good to do some severe vibration testing of both ourselves and the van. It is hard to drive safely when one's eyeballs are rattling around in their sockets like marbles in a shaken can. We took a quick walk around the somewhat uninspiring town, decided that there wasn't much to see, and so we relaxed around the van in the pleasant aire.

Neufchateau

The following day we drove on through the Ardennes and stopped at a lovely little site in Neufchateau near Bastogne. The weather remained hot and sunny so we parked up, unwound the awning and unwound ourselves, enjoying watching the rabbits hop around our pitch and swearing at the Dutch speedsters who insist on driving through campsites at maximum speed, raising clouds of dust.

Landal-Warsburg

On Sunday morning it was out of Belgium and immediately onto lovely smooth roads in Luxembourg. We filled the fuel tank to overflowing at an expensive 1.08 euro per litre, then blinked and were out of Luxembourg and into Germany and onto the Landal Warsburg site at Saarburg. The site was very busy indeed. Trust us to pick the blooming Dutch school holidays. The Dutch are the noisiest people in Europe and we anticipated that a campsite full of them would be bedlam, but we found a lovely quiet corner and made the most of the warm weather by pulling out all our camping equipment, including the endless breeze fan, and sat outside drinking chilled bubbles. Bliss.