Thursday 5 March - Naitré (France)

Where's Bertie: He's in a small Aire in a little settlement just outside of Naintré. Exact location: 46.76639, 0.51090

Weather: Some sunshine but mainly lightly overcast, but warm (20 degrees max)

Make northerly miles whilst the wind's southerly, as the famous saying goes, so we set out early today. It wasn't yet light as we rolled out of Berastegi. 

With fuel being so much cheaper in Spain than in France, a 700m detour from the motorway was taken to fill Bertie's tank (135.6c/litre), with a slight delay as the fuel station was just putting 'not available' signs on certain of their fuel types. Happily bog standard diesel was still available. 

It was only when we went through the next toll plaza that I realised that because of how this motorway charges, when we left the road to go to the petrol station, we paid for the bit of road we'd used to that point, then when we went through the next toll plaza we paid for the entire section of road, including the bit we'd already paid for. However, given that the toll in question was €1.61 and the fuel was 63c/litre cheaper than France, the saving was still worthwhile. Oh, and when I say that we 'filled up' we still haven't had Bertie's leaky-when-full fuel tank fixed* (hey, it's only been 6 years...), but on this occasion we pushed it and went to 7/8th full. We know he doesn't leak at 3/4 full, and even when he does leak it's a slow drip, so 7/8th seemed a worthwhile gamble given the price differential.

Our next stop, well into France, was supposed to combine lunch with filling LPG. That didn't go well as we found ourselves in a HGV area due to a 1.8m height barrier for cars. Having to mingle with HGVs isn't unusual, but in this case we had to go through a ticket barrier, with the ticket telling us we had a maximum of 1-hour to leave. That would usually be plenty of time for lunch, but when we couldn't find the LPG pump either (it was definitely there somewhere!), we opted to move on. Lunch was had in a rest area a couple of junctions further along the road and we were later successful in our LPG mission, albeit at 5c/litre more (and Bertie's tanks were as low as we ever let them get, with just 12 litres remaining). 

The question over lunch was 'Where are we going?'. The furthest south we could afford to spend tonight, in order to get to Wissant/Calais in time with comfortable driving days, was at Castets (where we stayed on our way S), but had passed there before 10am. The next likely candidate I'd identified was by the failed LPG stop, which was also too early. So, we found ourselves in this Aire, north of Poitiers. I've no idea why it exists, as it's in a tiny community, with no shops to benefit from visitors. There's a full bespoke service point here, but (it appeared) only room for two vans, and we were the second to arrive. We have since been joined by an absolutely massive bus of a motorhome, who has proved that we were short-sighted in thinking that the place was full. 

After a chat with our Belgian neighbours, we took ourselves for a leg-stretch along the road and back, and to the river and back. At the latter we witnessed a man throwing sackfuls of very mouldy baguettes into the water, from where they floated off downstream. Why he was discarding them in a watercourse, rather than a bin, is anyone's guess, but I assume he knew it wasn't an acceptable thing to do, as with our presence, he quickly emptied the bag he was holding, then left with the other two sacks in his boot still full. I wonder how long the ones he discarded took to sink, as I can just imagine someone standing on a bridge downstream when a couple of dozen blackened baguettes bob by.  

(*Bertie's leaky fuel tank: we have taken him to a garage, with tank all but empty, for it to be fixed. When we picked him up they said they couldn't see the problem and needed to drop the tank to investigate further, which is exactly what we'd asked them to do and why we'd taken him with an empty tank. We didn't book him back in. At some point I'm going to remove the flooring in between the two cab seats and hopefully find there's an access hatch to the top of the tank, whereupon we may find that an issue that has taken us years to address is a really easy fix.)