Lesson Number One: Believe ones Wife My wife has kindly informed me for many years that I am always making errors. In particular that I do not listen to her when she is telling me things that she knows are correct. So today was one of those moments. To make sure we have the van on a level we own two ramps. Each ramp has four steps so that the wheels can rise about 2 or 3 centimeters each step. My job is to back up (or drive forward) onto the ramps and stop whe...

After our overnight stop outside Macon we then had the pleasure of a short drive south. The route along the Saone, later the Rhone valley is littered with vineyards! We made the asy decision, after failing to stop anypeople where neqar Beaune that we should now stop. Having checked the books, local guides and so forth we decided on a co-operative just south of Macon called Chateau de Chenas. Tasting wine at 10am is not a good idea but what else can one do. We e...

Cormoranche Sur Saone near Macon 14th June This has been one of those days! When we arrived at Montigny last night a kind Dutchman pointed out a problem: we were leaking an oil of some sorts. Indeed. He thought lots was coming out and so did Meryl! With a wet road it seemed to be running in a stream down the rather steep hill where we had camped. We had seen it before and I had put it down to an engine overfill when the van had been serviced. However, wi...

Montigny-le-Roi 13th June 2013. What a day a day makes! The drive into France involved again a foursome: breakfast in the Netherlands, coffee and croissant in Belgium, lunch in Luxembourg an finally an evening meal in France. So we get added variety and spice! From our overnight halt at Maastricht, we rapidly arrived in the hell of Liege. By that I mean we are into an area of industry, heaving traffic and, as the French put it, 'bouchons'. Today we could...

Maastricht 12th June 2013. I have always wondered what this place was like given its importance in the history of the EC and John Major. I thought we might see some marauding, wide-eyed Tory backwoodsmen roaming the streets chanting some slogan or another about the awfulness of Europe and what a hateful place it was. 'Get us out of here, I'm a Tory' might be the correct form. As well as looking at the ordinary, visible and somewhat superficial lives of the ...