Day 18 - Map Reading Woes Continue

We were awoken at 7.00am with our alarm to herald the start of a long day. At 8.00am sharp we handed our room key to Frederick and he let us out of the garage.

We set the Satnav for a route with tolls that was ‘just’ the 504 miles in distance to our campsite in Brittany that ‘should’ take around 8 hours without stopping.

Our route took us north up the A63 paying a €4.40 toll what seemed like every few miles. Just an into our journey we stopped for a coffee to ensure we were awake for the long haul.

The traffic was pretty horrendous around Bordeaux, again, so 30 miles beyond Bordeaux we looked at treating ourselves to a McDonald’s. As I was driving at 130+ kilometres per hour, Jackie took charge of locating a suitable on the way McDonald’s on her phone. She found one just 30 minutes away. Perfect, we would arrive at 11.30am .

I have learnt from experience, that Jackie is not too hot at reading maps. So before we put the location into my satnav, I asked Jackie to show me the location of the identified McDonald’s. I nearly crashed when I saw that it was actually back in Bordeaux, the way we had just come.

We eventually pulled off the toll road at Pons and located a McDonald’s.
Jackie had a Big Mac meal and I had just a Big Mac and a side of a cheeseburger.

We then found a petrol station and filled up. It was so much cheaper than the toll road service stations that we probably saved enough to pay for our burgers.

We continued north around Niort and then onto Nantes where the traffic was diabolical, mainly due to crashes causing serious tailbacks in the searing heat.

The outside temperature went up to 34*C and remained over 30*C until well after 6pm.

Having negotiated our way through Nantes, we were cruising along the N165 with just under 2 hours to our destination, when Jackie was insistent that we stop for a cold drink. We agreed to find a suitable petrol station, which Jackie found was an E.Leclerc supermarket where we could buy petrol and drinks.

My iPhone was overheating and stuck on a hardcore punk playlist, so we relied on Jackie to provide me with directions via commentary. She directed me to pull off the dual-carriageway.

As we approached a roundabout, Jackie told me to take the 3rd exit. Unfortunately she was counting the exits clockwise As we were on French roads, I obviously negotiated the roundabout in an anti-clock wise direction and counted off the 3rd exit so we were now driving in completely the wrong direction.

The SatNav and Jackie’s phone got into a right kerfuffle. I was hot and bothered and tired, so I pulled over and in a huff typed the petrol station location into the SatNav without checking its location.

We did a U-turn, drove for several miles then to my horror we rejoined the N165 now in the wrong direction. It was a further 7 miles along the road before we pulled off and found the E.Leclerc supermarket or so we thought!

We parked up at the E.Leclerc complex and entered the huge building through one of several entrances. The 1st entrance turned out to be a pet shop, the 2nd a garden furniture store and thirdly an electrical appliance shop.

I checked my phone and discovered the actual supermarket was a further 3 minutes drive away. We fuelled up, which was the cheapest so far, then drove on to the supermarket.

It was supposed to be a quick in and out for cold drinks, but Jackie decided she wanted to buy some essentials. We bought bread, ham, cheese, bacon, crisps, milk, orange juice, 8 litres of wine and the thing we had come in for 2 Coke Zeros.

I also bought a box of 4 mango and white chocolate cornet Magnums. It probably wasn’t the wisest purchase on the hottest day of the year on a long car journey. I ate one and the rest went in the fridge.

The SatNav now told us that we had 2 hours 45 minutes to go and we would arrive at 6.45pm.

Brilliant……about an hour ago we were less than 2 hours away from our destination. To make matters worse, Jackie then discovered the campground reception closed at 7pm. She tried emailing them but they didn’t respond.

I drove as fast as I dared without inheriting a collection of speeding tickets and when the heavy traffic and queues allowed. The ETA went up to 7.00pm, then beyond. Amongst the stress, we did receive some good news in that the other campsite we had originally booked into had refunded our €99 deposit following Jackie’s pleading email.

We eventually arrived at 7.02pm and were hugely relieved to find reception open where we received a very warm welcome. Our grassy pitch is enormous with a French middle-aged group one side and an elderly German couple the other - who have been coming to the same site for the last 14 years.

We erected our tent and set everything up in record time….just over an hour. We are getting proficient at this camping lark!

Jackie had blown up one bed and was about to start on the second, when a Frenchman who didn’t speak English from another pitch came over. Together we worked out he wanted to borrow our electric pump. I tried to tell him that we were still using it and I would bring it over to him, but he was saying he only wanted to borrow it for 5 minutes.

My negotiating skills with a Frenchman were about as good as Two-Tier Keir’s recent migrant negotiations, because I ended up taking the pump from Jackie and handing it to him. He returned it 15, not 5 minutes later much to Jackie’s annoyance.

The French group who were eating their seafood feast with champagne later congratulated us on our tent erection skills which was nice.

I managed to unintentionally upset our German neighbours with my not so fluent German. Out of courtesy I tried to ask him if I could take a shortcut under his washing line. I demonstrated the action, but I couldn’t make him understand.

5 minutes later he returned apologising and then promptly took his washing line down. I didn’t attempt to explain that was not what I meant, but as a peace offering Jackie gave them a couple of our citronella candles.

We had wine and crisps for dinner and I had the remaining 3 very melted magnums, which made a hell of a sticky mess.

The evening ended around midnight, when Jackie went to bed with some biscuits, then called me in to take the wrappers. Unfortunately the wrappers weren’t empty and sugary biscuit crumbs were liberally scattered around our sleeping pod. To make matters worse I returned to my almost completed blog to discover that yet again I had somehow lost it again.

It was time for bed. I had a wee in the field and joined Jackie amongst the crumbs.

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