France 159 - Carentan - unbelievably muddy/ Day 7 on a camping card aire /a port de plaisance and a Monday market

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It's Day 7 and we are having a quiet day. The weather is still reasonable for the time of the year. It is hard to believe that it is December. If you ignore the flooded fields and the muddy camping car aire it could almost be Spring. The Lithium battery is still holding up and we have not needed to hook up to electricity for the last seven days. How good does that feel. We drove the short distance from Bayeux to the small town of Carentan. We chose here because we needed water and to do a dump. Not an attractive word but something that needs to be done. The aire we chose was a camping car one. We can check on line to see how many spaces there are and how many are available . This one told us 12 were on the site and 12 were available. The likelihood of any of them going before we got there was remote . We have seen so few motorhomes this trip and certainly no Brits. Has Brexit put them off? We will be leaving the EU in a month, Is that putting travellers off? Or is it just the time of the year? Do motorhomers prefer to stay at home? We decided our decision to get away from the Christmas hype, the awful programmes on the TV, the sales adverts and the adverts for summer holidays was the best we have ever made.

We struggled to find the aire . Silly told us it was somewhere close and that it was near to Camping Haut Dick which was closed for the season. We saw the closed camping site but no sign of the aire was apparent . We tried again driving back slowly down the same bit of road . No sign of where we were looking for. In the end a man out walking his dog spotted us and guessed that we were looking for the aire . He waved. He pointed and we spotted the sign. It was not easy to find but find it we did. The site looked a little down at heel. The entrance was thick with mud. I had to wade through it to put our card up against the machine . It took a while to register but eventually the barrier lifted and we were let in. First job do the grey water dump. As we were the only residents we could take our time. We filled up our plastic bottles with water and dumped the toilet cassette . Some people carry two cassettes so that they can camp longer . We pondered on the question "Did we need to buy another ?" Hard to say. The cassette is smaller than the one in Suzy so we need to be aware of where emptying points are. It is no hardship just another thing to think of if we wildcamp and we will be doing much more of that now. We still needed an LPG garage and had sourced one out at Carentan . A job for tomorrow . We picked a plot and parked up. We plugged in to electric pushing the cable through the door. Not a good idea and one we shall not do again. We topped up our card whilst we were there and logged into their free WiFi. Not the most salubrious site but we did get a fairly quiet night . Just us and three others.

We slept until late , ate breakfast before walking up to the Port de Plaisance. Full of leisure craft it looked a rather nice place to pull into. We crossed the canal before heading to town. The market was set up. It was bustling , stalls selling fruit and vegetables, cheese and flowers, odds and sods and everything you needed even though you never knew you needed it. We bought coffee eclairs and a cooked chicken . It is hard to be a vegetarian here and I find myself having to eat meat. The chicken was tasty to be fair so it was not a great hardship to eat it.

There was not much to keep us in Carentan so we packed the van up . It took me five minutes to get through the gate again. The machine refused to accept the card. Sometimes machines dislike our British cards but this was a french one so it should have worked . We headed for the gas station only to find it was a 24/24 unmanned one. I hate these as they are generally busy and the machines can refuse the credit card or take too much money out. We are not going to run out of gas so we drove out of the garage forecourt . We shall try again tomorrow . Gabby hit another birthday today . 21000 miles on the clock . We are raking the miles up on this holiday even though we seem to travelling less far. We dont care - thats what Gabby is for . Getting us to interesting places and she does it with style . So how many Tesco vouchers do we have for our next trip?

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Photos

A selection of cakes on offer
How can you refuse?