After leaving the slightly ramshackle site that is Albert velodrome – we emptied the grey waste (washing up and shower water), dumped the toilet waste, filled up a half tank of fresh water and set off on a long day of travelling.
Although the site had a lot of convenience, we prefer free camping as it is a lot more secluded, less randoms and you get a lot more privacy – plus it’s free. We were looking forward to hitting the road.
The French roads are amazing for travel but Sassy our Motorhome only really travels well up to 65mph. There is so much space in France compared to the UK.
We normally ask the kids on days of travel to listen to something educational for half the journey and then they can listen to whatever music / podcast they want – never watching anything! Just listening on long motorhome journeys (the ‘high road’ – I have chosen).
We arrived at our Aire – Berry-au-Bac after a couple of hours, set up, levelled up and had a cup of tea and some biscuits overlooking the Canal L’Aisne. The water was deep blue, site super quiet and plenty of fish. Our son A immediately told me I should have packed his Smuggler fishing rod. A massive dad fail.
As we travel and educate the kids we have given them a couple of titles they may have missed out on at school. Our son was head boy in year 6 so our daughter is head girl for this travel term – this means she has a couple of stationery responsibilities, helps with timetabling and makes some lesson choices throughout the week. Our son was given the title Book Club Chairman for the term – he gets to decide which books we read, when, how long, who reads and most importantly – what biscuits to keep in the biscuit tin.
So we sat and watched the canal and smashed some maths for the kids. A was doing straight line graphs and H was doing place value.
After the work was done, we had a lovely bike ride along the canal, saw plenty of fish and cycled to a boulangerie – getting some delicious treats.
After starting to watch A Nights Tale on DVD we had a peaceful nights sleep after drinking a herbal tea.
We woke up refreshed and headed for Belgium. We had decided to stay somewhere for three nights to do washing and sort ourselves out a bit, and stumbled upon the old town of Bouillon in Belgium.
The town was cute and our site was on top of a great hill where we were a short walk from views of the 1000 year old Chateau de Bouillon and a view of La Semois – a gorgeous winding river overlooked by steep hills covered in high trees.
We wouldn’t stay again, as the site was a little hilly – but we did our washing and got to do some Wim-Hoff cold water bathing.
After three nights of relaxing on a site, clean clothes in storage, crafty beer bellies growing we set off for Hombourg-Haut Aire.
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