France 84 - somewhere near Auxonne which is somewhere near Auxerre , the sun is not shining but we are on holiday , red squirrels, the war will be over by Christmas and every cloud

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We slept well waking early, breakfasting on our first day on French soil. And how good did it feel? We left the campsite early and hit the main road through towns and small villages which were just coming to life. School children were waiting for the school buses, shops were just opening and along the road we saw numerous signs to War Cemeteries from the First World War. The War that would be over by Christmas and 100 years ago to now 2015 it was still going on well after Christmas had been put to bed for another year. The cemeteries were large with ornate memorials , others small in the middle of empty fields. All very poignant and sad and which made us realise the futility of war. The motorway arrived and the monotony began. Arrow straight lines with hedges full of white cherry blossom and yellow forsythia. Pretty at first but become sadly boring after a while . We saw a very small and very red squirrel on the road as we pulled in for our first break of the day. Stopping at an aire we marvelled at how good these are compared to our motorway stops back home. Clean, tidy, with ample facilities for recycling. After this stop we drove for a further two hours before stopping in another aire for lunch. We were ahead of the game and decided to drive further than we had planned to and we ended up in Auxonne a town in Burgundy. Our campsite for the night was Camping Municipal

Within 300 metres of the town we walked in . What is there there to do? A Vauban fort, a river fast and wide with pleasure craft, one street with many of the shops closed up. The pavements were cracked . It was not France at its best. There were a few restuarants and cafes, a reasonably open and pleasant square, a monumental church rather gloomy inside, a very impressive but lonely gatehouse once attached to town walls. Perhaps it would have looked better if the rain had not fallen down in bucketloads.

We walked back to the campsite and at 5 the owner turned up and opened up his small reception office cum shed. The smell of cigarette smoke hit me at the back of my throat. I paid up our 19 euro for the pleasure of staying on a less than average campsite with smelly dirty toilets. Had we turned up on the 1^st May we would have paid 16 euros for the priviledge. Couldn’t quite work that one out . Dearer in April than May – what is that all about?

When we left our site this morning the windscreen was covered in dust. We hated the rain falling heavily on it but it did wash the dust off ………………as the old saying goes ……..every cloud ……………………..

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