Sunday 15 March - Villedômer

Where's Bertie? He's at the Aire in Villedômer. I think it's his fourth visit here, the most recent being less than 2 months ago, on 23 January.
Weather: Glorious sunshine all day and nice and warm (21 degrees). Shame we weren't outside in it!

I'm pleased to report that nothing of interest has happened today, although we have driven for so many hours as to make it feel like a job. When we left Castellón yesterday morning, we had Villedômer down as our fourth night-stop, yet here we are two days later.

We didn't get an early start, mainly because yesterday was tiring and when my alarm went off at its customary time this morning, I turned it off and immediately went back to sleep. Goodness knows how late we would have slept if it hadn't been for the bread van arriving at 0845, announcing its arrival with the tooting of its horn.

What a lovely day!

After a quick visit to the viewpoint above the beach to watch the surfers for a few minutes, we hit the road at around 1045.
Motorways (as busy as we'd expect them to be on a Sunday) made up most of our day, including an extended stint on a toll road at the end of the day, by which time I was so fed up with being in a moving vehicle that paying €14 to arrive at our destination a little sooner, and without having to concentrate on junctions, roundabouts and endlessly changing speed limits, seemed like reasonable value.

The only other thing that happened today is that I changed our Channel Tunnel booking again, having decided to have a third big day of driving tomorrow (a decision helped by the realisation that the current restrictions on business in France means that the commercial Aire we'd intended to use tomorrow night will be closed). As I dialled the number* yesterday to make the original change, bringing it forward to Wednesday evening, I fully expected to have a long wait in a queue. To my surprise, my call was answered on the first ring. Today I couldn't get through at all first thing, and when I did get into the queue just before lunchtime, I stayed there a while, but with the end result that we are now booked onto a crossing on Tuesday morning. That gives us some uncertainty as to where we're going to stay tomorrow night, as we need to be reasonably close to Calais. The motorhome parking at Cite Europe has been removed, and our other local choice at Wissant is currently being advised against, due to migrant activity (as in trying to enter and stow away in motorhomes during the night).

I'm not known for worrying about tomorrow's night-stop in advance, though, so I'll put some thought into the question as we move north in the morning. For the moment, I need to go and stretch my legs to makeup for having spent the last 9 hours sitting down.

^{(*I used a Tesco voucher to pay for most of our outward fare on the tunnel. To use a voucher, you have to book by phone. You get sent the same sort of booking reference and on-line password as you do when booking on-line, but when I tried to amend our booking via t'interweb yesterday I was told I could only do so by phone. Assuming that's entirely related to how I paid for the original tickets (because I've certainly amended bookings online before) then my lesson learnt here is that if you only have enough vouchers to pay for part of one of the fares, then book the outbound by phone and the return online. It'll make no difference to the practicalities or the price, but it'll make changing the return leg easier (not that it's difficult to do it by phone, provided half the world isn't trying to do the same at the same time, which I acknowledge is a highly unusual situation.)}