Travels in a Campervan: Getting ready to return home

Thursday 29 September 2022

Nido's parked up on the aire at Forges-les-Eaux, which is run by the campsite opposite - Camping de la Miniere. Although €9, which includes EHU, it made sense to come here as it's mid-way between last night's stop and the vets in Buchy, where Salty has an appointment tomorrow for his pre-UK worming tablet. It's a calm, peaceful evening with a nice sunset; probably set to turn quite chilly tonight. We've stopped here a couple of times before, first in 2013 on our first ever trip to France in a motorhome and again in March 2018, on the first day of our three-month trip to France, Spain and Portugal.

After leaving Honfleur we had a fairly long drive to Saint Romain de Colsbosc to service the van for free (the aire also had free electricity), before stopping off at the nearby Hyper-U to do some food shopping. We both went around as we had a list of items we wanted to take home - all foodie stuff. We don't bother taking alcohol back as we don't drink much and it takes up too much room in the van. Our stop for the night was a wild-camp by the beach at Saint Jouin Bruneval. The approach is down a steep series of hairpins from the top of the high cliffs, dropping down to quite a rough parking area, backing on to trees at the base of the cliff. There were already a few vans parked up, including some surfing dudes as the waves here are quite wild; it must get very busy in the summer. The area between the cliffs and the high-tide mark was large pebbles and other types of rocks, with a sandy base as the tide receded. There's a restaurant (closed which was a shame as we could have enjoyed some moules-frites!), a cafe, lifeguard station with first aid post and toilets. All except the toilets were closed. On the other side was a very large supertanker jetty with oil or gas storage tanks. We took a good long walk along the beach, with Salty enjoying the opportunity to have a good run-around. It was very windy although quite sheltered back at the van as we were tucked behind a raised levee which protected us from the onshore wind. It was a quiet evening.

The next morning we left to head for a park-up I'd seen in some woods on Google Maps, not for an overnight stay, but for somewhere to stop for lunch then head out for a walk in the forest. Long walks this far north have been few and far between. The stop turned out to be one of over 140 World War 2 sites where the Germans prepared and then launched V1 rockets towards London - at a place called Val Ygot. Most of the concrete bunkers had been blown apart in a number of allied air raids and there were plenty of huge bomb craters still around the site and trees. But enough remained to provide a feel for what it would have been like and there was a mock V1 rocket on rails, looking ready to launch.

Our stop last night was a Camping Car Park site in the town of Formerie. It's only small with six pitches on tarmac. It's very new and the facilities were immaculate and well designed. The included wifi signal was also good, so we were able to catch up on some YouTube videos. It also allowed Cathy to use it for her weekly online Welsh course lesson, while Salty and I had a wander around the lanes and town in warm sunshine.

Van serviced, we drove the 30 minutes to Forges-les-Eaux, parked up, EHU plugged in and a quick lunch before taking Salty out for a walk. I had some charity work and accounts to do, so made use of the data remaining on our MiFi, before we closed up the van for the evening for dinner and a bit more YouTube.

Tomorrow we'll head for Buchy for Salty to take his worming tablet and get it recorded in his EU Pet Passport, which is a requirement for returning to the UK. We'll also be meeting up with a friend who lives in the next village to us (also a member of Mon SAR), who's been in France for two weeks in his A Class motorhome and his two dogs. They're both also booked into the vets, then we plan to find an aire to stop at together tomorrow night, hopefully with a pizza machine, so we can have a lazy dinner with a glass of wine!

We've brought our Shuttle crossing forward by a couple of days. We've done all we wanted so we'd only be hanging around for the remaining days just to kill time. So we'll be heading towards Calais on Saturday, finding a park-up for the night close enough to allow a short drive to the Eurotunnel Terminal very early on Sunday morning.