Off to France for a month of glorious sunshine (we should be so lucky). Licques first stop.

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We’ve now had just over 2 months at home following our June trip to Ireland. That was cut a little short by my attack of volcanic blood-pressure resulting in a night spent in Tralee hospital and we returned home a week earlier than planned to get it fully sorted out. Happy to say my BP is now consistently excellent.

The English summer of 2012 didn’t start at all until August and has been characterised by lots and lots of wet stuff. Even Uttoxeter got flooded one very wet Friday in July and I drove the car along roads which were more like rivers.

We’ve had a busy 9 weeks at home. First of all to my utter delight, I welcomed my daughter Jenny and family back from a 2 year sejourn in Melbourne. So lovely to see them and especially once they were reinstalled in their Gloucestershire house. Hard to believe but while we are away my ‘little’ granddaughter, Isobel, will start school and ‘baby George will have his 2nd birthday.

Bob also had his family time as daughter Jane came to the UK for a visit from Bangkok and granddaughter Amy, mother of baby Archie, is engaged and to be married in 2014.

We’ve managed a couple of weekends away with sister Liz and husband Graham, one at their house as the camping meet got rained off !

I have been making glass – oh and selling quite a lot of it too. Most of my spare time is spent cutting, foiling and soldering in the garage. As soon as we get back from this trip I will have to go into overdrive to stock up for Christmas. While I work away in the garage Bob can normally be found nowadays in the loft working on his model railway. And of course there have been my weekly overnight visits to Gloucestershire to get reacquainted with Izzy and George.

We enjoyed the Olympic ceremonies as seen on TV, as we failed to get any tickets, but we are now ‘Overlympiced’ after all the BBC hype for the next round, the Paralympics and are glad to be away from it.

Not surprising that the garden has had very little attention. From me at least, though Bob has worked hard trimming lawn and hedges. Fortunately the excessive rain has had one good effect, the plants in my large pots have thrived and I have sunflowers like trees, superb dahlias and a mass of colour everywhere.



The theme for this trip to France is “dot-to-dot”. I went through our travel records for all our French trips and put together a list of places and campsites which we had enjoyed, rated very highly. So I plotted all these on an Autoroute map as POIs and then passed it to Bob to play Dot-to-dot and come up with a route between them. So instead of visiting new places, this trip we are going to rediscover some of the places we have visited before. We are looking forward to a really lovely holiday and have both promised to do our best to stay out of hospital this time.

So the Tandy is full loaded with everything we could possibly need for a sunny holiday in France, allowing for just the occasional shower of course.



Up at the crack of dawn and away by 7 o’clock heading south on the M1. We had an extra hour or so for traffic jams but couldn’t find any, to our surprise, so when we arrived in very good time at the P&O kiosk at Dover they put us on the earlier ferry.

Had to have a bit of a word with Clarissa Tomtom as we left Calais as she very naughtily took us down the A16 Toll when there was a perfectly good non-toll road running alongside. As it happened, she knew something we didn’t and she was just trying to get us to our campsite as quickly as possible. When I asked for a pitch there was only one left. Phew… if we hadn’t caught the earlier ferry or if Clarissa hadn’t helped out we would have been pitchless.

Stopped in Licques at Camping Pommiers des Trois Pays, a lovely, smallish and green site with a pool, bar etc. Also as it happens quite a lot of children still as it is not yet the end of August. It will be much quieter and we shouldn’t have any full campsite problems after the weekend.

I had my first swim for months and months albeit not for long as the (covered) pool is quite small and was busy with the children. But it has got me back into the swim again. That’s obviously the origin of that expression !

For the first time this year we had dinner outside. It may not have been roasting hot (the weather not the dinner) and it might have started a bit of rain just after we finished but we enjoyed our alfresco meal and having checked the forecast we can expect quite a few more outdoor meals and sunshine.

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Comments

[RosyDC]

Sojourn (sp.)
Thanks Joy; am in awe of someone who can write a report this soon into a holiday!

[BobsJoy]

Blog
I did write the first part of the blog, the bit about what we did before we left home, before we left when I was setting the laptop up with all the files we need. So I cheated a bit there !

[BobsJoy]

Sp correction Sojourn
Apologies for spelling mistake of Sejourn and thanks big sister. I normally check but missed that one. It will have to stay in place as it gets really tricky editing after I have published !