Sunday 22 January - Villedômer

Where's Bertie? He's at the Aire at Villedômer, where he's been at least four times before.
Weather: Cold and feeling even colder than reported, but dry and mainly bright.

It was a good decision, I think, not to travel further last night. As appealing as it was to get miles under our belt, we acknowledged today that the reality of a later stop would have been a later start this morning. As it was, we were on the road at just gone 9am*, having been bad tourists and failed to have set foot outside of the Aire in Wissant (it was a close thing; I really wanted to nip down to the beach, but my desire to get to the coast in Spain came out as greater).

Our first stop was in Neufchâtel-en-Bray, just over two hours south. There we detoured two minutes from the main road to park next to the Voie Verte ex-railway leisure route that extends all the way to Dieppe. I didn't go that far, but did run for a hour whilst Mick did the same duration but at a slower pace (his Achilles is just recovering from objecting to him tripping over a bramble on New Year's Day). Bertie had told us it was +1 degree as we set out, but it didn't feel that warm, and I ran the first 4k with blocks of ice for feet.

Lunch came hot on the heels of us returning to Bertie, travel mugs were refilled, as was Bertie's fuel tank (191c/litre; exchange rate 1.14:1) and southwards we headed once again.

By the last hour of the journey I was more than ready to stop, and the spectacular pre-sunset light display only marginally distracted me from the fact that I'd been sitting down for too long. The end did eventually come and earlier than yesterday at just gone 6pm. That gave us time to nip out for a quick walk after tea (very quick; I had a couple of blog posts to write...).

It's our last day of knowing where we're going tomorrow, which means we need to make a decision as to where we're heading on Tuesday. Since last October, and until yesterday, I thought we were heading to the S coast of Spain, somewhere between the border with Portugal and Tarifa, then whilst Mick was driving yesterday I interrogated Google Maps and realised that if we travel to Seville (where I have an appointment in late February) via Valencia, it's almost the same distance. So as I type this, we have no idea which coast we're hoping to hit this week. Nowt like having a reputation for being overly organised, is there?!

Two snaps taken out of Bertie's window, completely failing to represent the light spectacle we saw in person. No one would ever accuse me of being early in baking our Christmas cake (usually a day or two before Christmas), but I outdid myself this year, baking them (I made two loaves rather than one traditionally shaped cake) two weeks into the New Year. 

^{(*later-remembered detail that I couldn't retrospectively shoehorn into the narrative: the heating, set to 7 degrees so as to prevent Bertie's frost protection from dumping our water, woke me as it sprang into action at 3am. During the brief period of being awake, I realised we'd forgotten to: 1) prepare our breakfast (a process we refer to as 'plumptiating'); 2) get the smoke and CO alarms out; and 3) set the heating timer so it would warm Bertie up before I needed to get out of bed. None of those three realisations kept me awake for more than a few minutes.)}