Monday 24 January - Cubnezais

Where's Bertie? He's in a car park in Cubnezais (N of Bordeaux). He previously spent nights here in January 2020 and in March 2019.
Weather: Gloriously sunny start and end to the day, but with around 3 hours of fog in the middle. Morning temperature: 1-4 degrees; afternoon: up to 14 degrees.

We were already driving down the A154 this morning by the time the big golden orb of the sun rose over the hoary fields. It had been a cold night, and the field adjacent to which we were parked looked pretty in the pre-dawn light, but I was quite happy to view it from inside rather than venturing out. It was thus Mick's job this morning to nip across the road to the Epicerie to pick up a couple of pastries for elevenses. 

With our target for the day being such a long way in front of us, we were hoping for a smooth day. I scuppered that hope quite early on, by setting a 'travel via' waypoint of a supermarket in the town of Dreux. I didn't need to set that waypoint, as we were going to be driving right by the store, but it would mean that we didn't sail on past.

Unfortunately, as I now know, I selected the Lidl on the wrong side of Dreux, not on our route at all, and because I wasn't paying a great deal of attention, I didn't notice until a few hundred metres too late. Attempts to turn around had us driving tiny residential streets, finding many dead-ends that Google thought were through routes, and it must have been a good twenty minutes until we were finally back to where we needed to be, only then to find that the car park was guarded by a 2m height barrier (we found a road around the back where we could park and I went on foot). Add that to the stop to buy fuel, where the machine kept telling us it couldn't accept our credit card, then finally decided it could, only for me to misremember the relevant PIN. All delays we could have done without!

Things didn't improve when, a while later, we both failed to notice that the speed limit had dropped to 70 (the usual speed limit on a single-carriageway road is 80, but on a criteria that we've not yet worked out, that often (but not always) drops to 70 when passing a junction). The first we knew was when a speed camera flashed just a few metres before the 'end of 70' sign. A glance at the SatNav told us we were doing 79.

Darn it! If we were going to be paying a speeding fine, then we may as well have taken the toll roads, have saved at least an hour off our day, not to mentional all the faff of constantly changing speed limits, traffic lights, and roundabouts.

The mood lifted a short while later when a quick Google search told me that since Brexit the reciprocal agreement between DVLA and France has ended. We got flashed again later in the day, but on that occasion we weren't speeding (on roads with various speed limits for different types of vehicle, motorhomes tend to get flashed because the cameras see them as being big and assume they're subject to the lower limit, only later in the processing to decide that they were actually legal).

After a tedious morning of slow roads, just before Tours we took to the toll road and, contrary to the usual tactic of using only short sections to bypass the worst bits of the slow roads, today we stayed on it all the way to Poitiers. Just under twenty euros was the damage, but it saved us about an hour (and a lot of tedium).

From there the N10 is effectively a free motorway, except that it doesn't have any service/rest areas, instead directing traffic to nearby towns for any services they need. We did detour via one village, just to empty Bertie's toilet, at which point we switched driving duties. I would have liked to have swapped back before the end of the day, but equally didn't want to waste time by leaving the motorway to find somewhere to pull over. That left me at the wheel and put Mick on navigational duties for the fiddly last few kilometres of the day. He would much rather have been driving (because he doesn't like navigating, not (I hope!) because my driving is frightful).

The sun was sinking rapidly by the time we pulled into the car park in Cubnezais, so we wasted no time in nipping out for a quick leg-stretch around the village, getting back to Bertie just as the sun dipped out of sight.

Bertie, all on his lonesome in the car park, just as the sun went down. With a forecast negative overnight temperature, we've deployed the external blinds tonight.  

An interrogation of atlases and apps this evening has suggested a destination for tomorrow and, yes, it will be in Spain.