Off to explore the old town this morning and what a lovely old town it is, located on the northern shores of a huge mountain lake there are little alleyways ducking and diving all over the place with shops set back into deep doorways and cafes every second shop. There are little canals running through the whole area with buildings built right up to the edge almost what we expect Venice to be like. Settling in at a small café for my daily espresso the girls wanted coffee and hot chocolate respectively we just watched the world go by. We also found finally that many of the shops close at 12.00 and don’t open again till 2.00 and stay open until 7.00, like a little siesta in the afternoon. Heading off to a shop called FNAC ... read more

Waking early we set off to explore Auxerre and found some neat little streets and alleys. Like many places we have been to there is much re-construction going on both on the buildings and the streets. Finally leaving Auxerre we headed south again deciding against going to Dijon and instead going past some 30kms to a little village called Auxonne a commune in the Côte-d'Or department in Bourgogne in eastern France, again located on the Saône river. On the way we passed an old abandoned chateau at Saint More and set off to explore it, very cool with a moat and all, it appeared to have been lived in recently but was very run down, sad really. All the time since leaving Paris we have not been on a single motorway and have kept strictly to ... read more

Back to the hop on bus, we are getting better at the transport system and it took less time to get to town today. On the bus our first stop was the Eiffel tower and as usual some of it was under bloody refurbishment and getting to the top was not going to happen, we got to the second level about 1/3 the way up and what a view, we decided to walk down the stairs all 600 odd of them, bloody legs hurt all day after that. The Eiffel tower was just spectacular and way way bigger than you expect. The number of people there is hard to explain and it is surprising the damn tower doesn’t fall over, shoulder to shoulder all the way. Off to the Louvre it is spectacular, the Mona Lisa ... read more

Were are off this morning to Paris after finding no camping places at all in Belgium we decided to just pass right through and to the 450kms to Paris in one hit, it would make up a day we were behind. While Belgium had some pretty countryside it was nothing special, however due to a wrong turn on the freeway we ended up in Waterloo by accident. We had planned on coming here as it is the scene of the battle of Waterloo that Napoleon was involved in way back whenever, my history is not that good. We stumbled on this really cool palace and monument to Leopold one of the kings of Belgium, again a nice bonus but nothing spectacular. Onwards gain on the motorway we finally passed the French/Belgium border and were told that ... read more

After a well deserved sleep in we may stay here for another day as Pam still has work to do. We awoke to a foggy morning and quite cold after yesterdays 19 degrees and heard a woodpecker in the trees, couldn’t find see him though. A quick decision was made and we decided to head for Amsterdam to see the sights that famous city has to offer, We first headed to our campground called Camping Zeeburg, well if you didn’t have a GPS it would be hard to find, we wound down this little lane between old boats and little hovels to a little oasis bounded by the river on one side and a canal on the other. Typical of this trip the place was under renovation so the facilities were a little sub standard but ... read more