This is an addition to earlier blog posted today. We thought we better let you know this travelling is not all about drinking wine and eating pastries things do go wrong!!! I will now relate the story of our journey from the Ardeche down to the Med. coast in Languedoc. We left Privas on the 27th May and had been on the motorway about an hour when we heard a worring sound from the rear end of the car,it happened just as a lorry was overtaking so we thought it was him, wrong. We pulled into an aire (rest area) and after checking around the car and caravan discovered that the nearside rear wheel on the car was very hot. It is law in France that if you require a tow off the motorway you must first contact the police,luckily for us there was a police car and motorway security in the aire, so they called the breakdown for us.After about 30 mins a battered looking Renault low loader arrived, we soon had the car onboard and the caravan hitched behind, we then set off at an alarming rate of knots down the motorway,remember no lights have been connected to the caravan so we have no brake lights or indicators. A hair raising journey through some very narrow lanes bought us to a village in the middle of no where to what we can best describe as a scrap yard (see pics).After some phone calls to our breakdown insurance service in England we were soon back on the lorry and taken to a Ford dealer in a large town, we both breathed a sigh of relief even though the caravan was left in a public carpark while the car was taken to the garage. More stress followed when we were informed by the garage it would be monday before they could look at it. Another phone to the U.K. and the garage agreed to have a look straight away(remember the caravan is still in the public carpark), after checking the wheel the outcome was that a stone had been lodged in the brake disc but no damage done. It was now 5pm the sun scorching down (29 degrees) we had not eaten but decided to press onto our destination about 150 miles so with fingers crossed we hitched up the caravan and went on our jolly way either of us . I dont think either of us looked at the sat. nav so much wishing away the miles to our destination.Thankfully we arrived about 7pm (see pic of caravan) and needless to say several glasses of falling down water. We are in a place called Marseillan Plage on the Med. coast literally 1 minute from the beach. Will up date blog again next weekend .

We left the Rhone Alps on the 23rd May to travel to our next stop which was 168 miles away at Privas in the Ardeche. The main tourist attraction in this area is the Ardeche Gorges. The pictures above show the gorges from at the water level and the high level road
which follows the gorge for about 30 kilometres. As you can see the sun was shining and was about 30 degrees which was enough to make the tarmac start to melt!!!!!!!!!

This blog follows on from Sunday 23 May - Two of the pictures above are of the Gorge de la Fier which we visited while we were in Annecy (this is the correct spelling and not as on Sunday's blog - we have now sacked the typist!!!!!!) The wooden walk ways are fixed into the rock face about 20 metres above the rushing water below it was a spectacular sight.

The other picture is of Howard on the main footbridge over one of the waterways in Annecy.

We also forgot to mention yesterday we had to visit the local Maire (Mayor) office in Doussard as we had a parking ticket. After a lot of discussion about payment we then had to go to the Tabac (newspaper shop) and buy a 11 euro stamp to attach to the parking ticket and then hand it back to the Maire office.

We are now in the Ardeche region (South of France) in a town called Privas. If war broke out between England and Europe we would be in the doo doo big time as we are the only British people on the site out of approx 150 caravanners.

We have spent the last 6 nights in the Rhone Alps and this was our view from our campsite the temperature during the day was 25 degrees with wall to wall sunshine. The campsite was only 30 kilometres from the Swiss border the scenary was spectacular complete with Swiss style chalet houses. The top pictue is of lake annercy the largest and cleanest in France and at the head of the lake is the town of Annercy we took the picture from the top of the mountain picture above. The far right picture is the old town of Annercy called the Venice of the North because of the waterways through the town.

Hi everyone we've now had 4 days in the Burgandy region near a town called Chalon Sur Saone the picture on the far right is the market square. We wondered through the narrow streets and bought fresh baguette and some strawberries from the local street market. The picture in the centre is our caravan on our campsite - please note the sun awning is out!!! On saturday we went for a visit to a wine producer called Hameau Duboeuf as this region is famous for the production of Beaujolais see picture on the left of me sampling some - this trip was kindly paid for out of some of my collection money from my collegues at Diversey. We are moving on tomorrow to the Rhone Alps region which is about 150 south east of our present site. Blog will be updated towards the end of this week.

hello everyone - sorry we have been a while before we got in touch but it has taken us some time to get to grips with this Wif Fi system!!! We have now travelled 240 miles from our first stop and we are just outside the city of Troyes. On our first stop we visited the world war 2 launch site of the V2 rocket. We also had a trip into Saint Omer which is a pretty town. Tomorrow we are going into Troyes which is a 16th century medival town but on the outskirts of the town is a Mcarthur Glen shopping outlet! On Tuesday we are going to drive round the Champagne trail as we are in champagne country. The weather has been let's say changeable - days sunny on our first stop but cold at night and on this stop sunny in the day and warmer at night but we did have a down pour last night. We will be on our travels on Wednesday into Burgandy so will be in touch with an update very soon. Pictures will be on our next blog.