Overland to Morocco.
Winter 2014-2015
Bordeaux – Chef Boutonne….
Hey Ho isn’t it nice to be back in Europe and woken to the sound of Rain pitter pattering away on the roof in the morning with no sign of any blue or broken sky!
While that is how the day started, the night finished off with an electric fire whose element ‘died’!…..
Still at least we parked on a pathway which was like ‘hardstanding’ on which we have not sunk!
So after breakfast and the Bordeaux ‘Rush Hour’ that we hope had subsided we set off for our next stop which will be Chef Boutonne and a new place for us as the owner kindly confirmed in a telephone call last night that they are ‘Open’!
With the conditions as we got onto the Autoroute being not good the amount of traffic was quite heavy, so maybe the ‘Rush Hour’ was still in progress!....
As we go over the road bridge over the Dordogne River…..
As we then murkily passed this building which we think is a hotel….
OK! Listen to ‘Jane’ in the GPS and ‘Keep Left’ as we are heading for Angouleme….
Off the Autoroute as it became a ‘Toll Road’ and onto a Route National which is having a new High Speed Railway line built alongside it…..
Then after a reasonable distance on the Route National (RN 910) we bear right and go under the RN 910 and into one of the smaller villages on GPS Co-ordinates supplied from the 2015 Edition of a Dutch Organisation Called ACSI which provide details of campsites and having found one which is 'Open' I punched the co-ordinates into TomTom so we are heading there….
This Farmer was taking no chances and had all his hay under cover…..
As we roll along and through a few of the smaller villages…..
The road starts to get narrower like the single track roads in Morocco….
Then it looks like a ‘Farm Track’ with no sign of a campsite and we are in the middle of nowhere!.....
The next picture was at a cross roads of a ‘piste road’ and a single tarmac road with a field in each corner and no sign of a campsite!....
It turned out that the ACSI Co-ordinates given in the book are wrong and the campsite is actually 16Km (10Miles) away!
So we then have to turn around, which was no easy task on a narrow road with waterlogged ground either side, while ‘Flamenco Red’ did not let us down and we got around very well to go back the way we came, but heading now for the village of Chef Boutonne….
Passing the start of the construction of a ‘Wind Farm’ for which I am very glad we did not meet one of the Humungous Trucks that bring the sections of the Tower or Blades to the site as we would have been totally ‘In the Field’!
Hey Ho, keep going, not far now…..
Then we get to…..
Negotiating as you have to, the narrow streets in the town, which a couple have been made One Way as you would never be able to get two cars passed each other the road is that narrow….
While we pass the main square on our left….
It’s not much further to the campsite….
As we finally make it to the entrance….
And get parked up on a bit of hard standing as the pitches are very wet and not to be used if at all possible, which is why the ‘Camper’ who came in later is parked in the turning area as all the hard standing sections were in use…..
The report is of more rain tomorrow although at this moment in time it has stopped, so we will have to wait and see but we plan to stay for 2 nights here…
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