Candas

It had started to rain at about midnight, we could hear it hammering away on the roof of Wanda all night and at 4am we got up to leave Essex and it was still throwing it down. After a quick cup of tea we secured everything and done our pre flight checks and left for the channel tunnel at 4:45am. By the time we got to the M25 the roads were already starting to flood quite badly, but traffic was relatively light and flowing nicely even if it was slower than usual. The M20 was quite chaotic with big pools of standing water in the slow and fast lanes and more than once we lost visibility completely being swamped by torrents of water from the road and the sky.
We reached Eurotunnel on time at 7:20am and boarded with no problems, then I noticed a funny little symbol flash up on our sat Nav so I tapped it and a warning came up for severe heavy rain on the other side of the tunnel. In all of my years as a lorry driver I have never seen a sat Nav warning of dangerous weather conditions.
Exiting the train, TomTom was right. The rain was horrendous and the roads were like a skid pan with an inch of water running across the surface constantly. Fortunately we only stayed on the motorway for 20 mins before hitting the quieter roads through the villages and heading towards Amiens. 130 miles of wet roads led us to our first destination, les Grottes des Naours or the caves of Naours and just before we got there it stopped raining.
This place is a truest amazing spectacle of caves, or tunnels made from the limestone of the Picardy plateau and was dug out to form refuges. These refuges were called "muches" (hideouts in Picard language). Those in Naours, rediscovered at the end of the last century, are the largest known: all the underground areas combined can house around 2,600 people with their livestock. The layout is remarkable: around 300 chambers, public squares, stables, wells, chimneys, and a chapel with three naves. These underground areas were used by the British forces during the First World War and were used as the headquarters of the German forces during the second world war. We spent 2 hours here exploring and just as we got back to the motorhome it started raining again but by now it was late afternoon and time to start operation tortoise, our way of saying we need to find somewhere to camp.
Fortunately for us we found the perfect spot just 9 miles away down a quiet little back lane, in the little village of Candas right next to a beautiful old windmill.Read more