The Wine Route

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Planning this trip is improving my geography no end: now I actually know where Bordeaux is, for example, rather than it being just a name on the label of a wine bottle!

We're caught between wanting to visit as many places on our wish list as possible (also wanting to be able to give our friends an idea of where we'll be and when, in case they want to come out and visit us) and not wanting to have too much of a rigid schedule, it is supposed to be a holiday after all, but we've managed to put some timeframes on our first few stops and book the campsites! We start with our ferry to Cherbourg and decided that the best way to begin the holiday properly would be to do no more driving that day, so managed to find a campsite almost next to the ferry port, the idea being that this will be a low stress beginning, we can just drive off the ferry in to our first stop.

From Cherbourg we will head down towards Renne and then to the Loire Valley, we hope to spend some good cycling time here..

http://www.cycling-loire.com/

how many wine calories do you think this will burn off??

Then from here we plan to drive south to Bordeaux and spend some time exploring St Emilion (oh, ok, drinking more wine then!). We've estimated that this route down towards Spain will take us around four weeks so hope to plan a route in to Portugal next!

There's some shopping to do before we go as we need a few bits for the van, including European breakdown cover, I wonder if there's a policy that covers the three of us (Steve, the van and I) as any one of us could have the breakdown?! Thanks to our family, we received some statutory items needed for driving through France: red warning triangles, breathalyzers, spare lamp bulbs etc., as Christmas presents so the basics are covered but I'm sure we'll need many other vital items! Roll on pay day...

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