Today we picked up our campervan - it took a long time to go through all the instructions (hopefully between us we can remember the myriad of things we got told and shown).
First impressions are that the campervan is pretty well laid out. Its not quite as big as I imagined - which is both good (driving wise) and bad (space wise inside).
The water in the tank is heavily chlorinated - the first cup of tea was so bad it was tipped down the sink, and we've decided we will be buying our drinking and cooking water.

We left Paris for Giverny, the home and gardens of Claude Monet. Darryl did a superb job of his first stint of driving in a foreign country (other than the first red light that both driver and navigator missed - in fairness it had only just changed).
The route went through some small villages, with narrow roads and his driving skills were put to the test with some oncoming traffic but he was well up to the challenge. He only used the window wipers instead of the indicator once in the entire day.

We're very impressed with the offline navigation app we are using - OSMAND, we'd done some prep in NZ downloading maps and putting in our destinations - and it's working a charm - with settings to avoid toll roads and weight and height considerations, it seems to be doing great.

The Monet gardens were filled with flowers and the waterlily pond was beautiful. The kids took lots of photos. His house was interesting to view, and there was also a lot of Japanese art there. Sarah and I found some lovely paintings by a local artist in the impressionists style that we also really liked.
We left Giverny to head to Rouen a little over an hour away. Generally speaking we are intending to stay at farms and artisan producers - having joined up to a French Campervan scheme "passion france" whereby you are encouraged (but not obligated) to purchase the producers products and allowed to stay on their sites free of charge. With no sites in the near vicinity we searched for an "Aires" site online - a place with campervan facilities such as free parking, grey waste, water etc, and plugged it into our GPS program. There was an aires conveniently located for the sites we planned to see the next day so we plugged it in as our destination and headed off
A few more narrow villages but a pretty good trip until the last 5 minutes of the route, in which we had to drive through a series of underpasses, overpasses and roundabouts that I can only describe as spaghetti junction (See the photo section). While the instructions from the GPS program were pretty good, there were a few occasions where the gps lagged just enough to make the navigator a bit confused, or we didn't get into the necessary lane, or understand that a "slight right" actually meant take the exit. Needless to say spaghetti junction was a navigational disaster and it took us three long circuits through it in various directions to get where we needed to be. We arrived a little frazzled, to a not so endearing, somewhat industrial type site, but in no mood to try and find anything better we parked up for our first night.

Scott: It's funny when the campervan goes over the bumps cause the food goes up and down, and we we went round some tight corners the plate on the table slid. There were 6 rats at our Campervan stop. I tried to hit them with my slingshot.
Sarah: Spaghetti junction was cool.
April: We were laughing at Mum and Dad as they tried to find the way through spaghetti junction. I saw rat climbing a tree I thought it was a weasel.
Darryl: Spaghetti junction was not cool at all.