Category: Burgundy

Today was another busy but not fun day. We completed our last chores before we head south. We were up early to drive to Sens. On the way we had to pass thru Paris and we planned for the worst. We were pleasantly surprised to only hit one short slowdown so we arrived quite early in Sens.

With time to kill we went to a large supermarket to get some French groceries for our cupboards. We are now well stocked for the next few days.

Today we had our safety inspection, and except for discovering that both our low beam bulbs had burned out and needed to be replaced we passed with no problem. François burns thru headlight bulbs at a very rapid rate, no one has been able to figure out why. I am going to have to add periodically checking on them to my driving checklist. We also had one minor part to replace in one of our privacy screens.

We were at Eurocampingcars for about 4 hours waiting for everything to get taken care of. During that time we had a nice conversation with Sandrine the owner. We were surprised to learn that she currently has 68 overseas customers she is supporting.

With everything finally done about 5pm we headed to a nice campground on the Yonne river. Tomorrow we are off for Morocco.

Last night right after I fell asleep, a large thunderstorm swept thru. It started with about 10 minutes of peas sized hail which makes quite a racket hitting a camper made mostly out of plastic. The storm lasted about an hour with a good amount of rain, and a few nearby lightning strikes. Then everything quieted down, but it was noticeably cooler.

Today turned out to be our last day for our administrative stop in France. Once again we were on our way early to the Hotel de Police to drop off our appeal. We arrived at the police and were warmly greeted by Officer Nikolas, and the nice clerk whose name we never got. They took a look at our documents, told us that they were fine, and then took them back into the office, while we waited in the lobby. Officer Nikolas and another policeman made some small talk about our travels for a few minutes until the very nice clerk came out and told us the documents had been successfully sent to the administrator. Officer Nikolas then said we should hear something from the administrator in a little while and wished us a “bon journey”, and we were on our way.

We stopped at the office of Eurocampingcars to ask them to keep an eye out for a response to our appeal. Sandrine the owner of Eurocampingcars told us that several of their clients had run into the same problem, and she said it appears the English website to pay fines in France does not allow you to list the name of the driver due to a problem with a link. She called the police to pass this information on to help with our appeal. Now we just have to wait and see if our appeal is successful.

We were back at the campground a little earlier than planned so another load of laundry went into the washer, and we spent the rest of the afternoon planning the next stage of our travels. Tomorrow we are back on the road to begin a slow trek north towards our primary destination of Poland, and the Baltic States.

We were up bright and early in anticipation of our visit to the Hotel de Police in Sens. We were both a little nervous last night not knowing quite what to expect. The drive up to Sens was uneventful, except it started to rain again, and rained hard the rest of the morning.

We found the Hotel de Police no problem, but we had to look around for a few minutes to find a place to park François. Luckily the police station was next to the hospital and we found parking in a large lot there. Just as we were at the door to the police station 4 National Police officers walked up and asked us in French what we wanted. I hit them with my well rehearsed “I’m sorry I don’t speak French”, and before I could continue to my equally well rehearsed ” Do you speak English”, one of the younger of the officers asked ” Do you speak English?”, when I affirmed I do, he said “Then I will be helping you today.” So we were off to a good start.

We were invited in and told to take a seat in the lobby. After a few minutes Officer Nikola came out and asked how he could help. I handed him all of our paperwork and gave told him our story. He asked a few questions, asked for a copy of the registration for the car and my passport. He said wait a few minutes. After a few minutes he came back out with a clerk, and she asked a few more questions about our Societe Civile, then told us to wait a few minutes again. They finally came out and explained that we had not responded to the ticket we had received in 2023 with the name of the driver, and had not responded to a second request for the name of the driver. I explained to Officer Nikola that we had paid the fine as soon as we received it, and he acknowledged that, but the issue was not providing the name of the driver. I told him I was the driver and would have been happy to say that if we knew it was required, and that we had not received the second request.

Officer Nikola and the clerk had a short conversation in French, and told me that it was “not unusual” for the documents requesting the name of the driver to not be received in the post. He said this in a very neutral way, not denying what I was saying was true, but also implying that he hears that quite often. I appreciated his professionalism.

He then explained how we could appeal the finding of the administrator. He said that we needed to mail a statement telling the story I had just told him to the office we were at in Sens. I asked if we could hand deliver it, and he asked the clerk and she smiled and said “oui”. But then she told us one condition that we did not expect. She stated that the appeal needed to be in writing by hand, not typed. I looked at Officer Nikola and he confirmed written by hand is much preferred. After we submit the document he said we would know the answer of the administrator within 90 days.

From arrival to departure was less than an hour, and both the clerk, and Officer Nikola were very helpful and courteous. They were patient in answering all of our questions, and provided us with helpful information.

Armed with the information we returned to the campground with a plan. I would write our appeal in English, then I would take my English and put it into Google translate, we would ask the manager of the campground to confirm that googles translation was accurate, and finally Ton would hand write our appeal in French based on googles translation. It took most of the afternoon to write the appeal, have the French verified, and then write it out in French by hand. Ton definitely got the worst of the bargain with the handwriting part.

Tomorrow we will be heading back up to Sens to drop our appeal off, and see what happens.

Today is going to be another short post. After two days of long driving we decided to take a day of rest. We slept in late and enjoyed a quiet day poking around the campground. After a couple of weeks of bad weather today was warm. One of the good things about all of the rain is the trees and flowers are in full bloom. One of our random observations that is probably not true in reality is that the song birds in France sing more and are louder than anywhere else we have been.

I finally coaxed Ton out for a short walk. Her heart was not really in it, so we never got out of the industrial area next to the campground.

The reason we have taken a 4oo mile detour in the wrong direction is right before we left for this trip we received a notice that we owed a substantial fine to the French government. The problem is this is the first notice of this fine we ever received. It is not a fine that you would get for a speeding or parking ticket but for something more substantial. We have no idea what we could have done to get such a large fine, or why we received no prior notice that we had done something wrong. After sending an inquiry to the office we received the notice from we still are not sure what is going on. We received some more information that it was for failing to identify someone who had been speeding, but this is the first time we have never heard of this issue, and never received a ticket or notice that we needed to identify someone to the police. The tax office which is responsible for collecting the fine told us that we needed to go to the police in Sens to find out more about what we have been fined for. So tomorrow we are off to Sens to try to understand what is going on. We have showed our documentation to a couple of people who are fluent in French, and they are also equally shocked about the amount, and also cannot figure out what exactly we are being fined for. Wish us luck.

Another busy day for us, but not terribly interesting for a blog. We woke up early and got on the Autoroute heading south towards Paris. Our destination today was Migennes in Burgundy, the total drive was a little more than yesterday, but today was Saturday so the traffic was lighter.

The good news is that our route took us right by one of the two Costcos in Paris, so of course a stop was in order. We enjoyed a two hour stroll thru Costco, and now the refrigerator, and all of the cupboards are stocked with our favorite goodies. My only disappointment was that they were temporarily out of hot dogs, so I had to settle for a large portion of French Fries from the snack bar.

The rest of the drive was uneventful, and the traffic south of Paris was very light, so I managed to use cruise control most of the way. I know I have been whining a lot about rain, but when we pulled into the campground we saw the soccer/rugby fields next to it were flooded. It turns out that the campground we are staying at was on short notice to evacuate due to the heavy rains. Luckily it wasn’t necessary, but apparently it was close according to the campground manager.

Lastly, Happy Birthday to my beautiful wife.

Another day focused on covering distance. We traveled about 380 kilometers all but about 30 of which was in medium to heavy rain, so it was not a very fun day.

There is not much else to talk about. I picked Beaune as the stopover today as it was a good distance north and a town we had fond memories of. It was the place we spent our second night in a RV in France. It is a beautiful town with a lot of interesting historic sites, and great wine.

With the rain the photographer in the family was not motivated to walk into town, so we hunkered down and had a big meal. We have a lot of food to eat in the next few days so we had a big meal and a bottle of wine. I took a quick walk into town but was quickly driven back to François and Ton when another shower came down. The rest of the evening was spent vegging in front of screens watching movies.

We are still in Migenness waiting for our power cord to arrive and recovering from jet lag. Each trip it seems to take just a little bit longer to get over the jet lag. As much as we don’t want to admit it we are getting older.

Today will be short and sweet as we did not do much. I am still falling asleep early and waking up early and Ton is still falling asleep late and waking up late, though she did fess up to not wanting to get out of the warm bed delayed her getting up this morning. The temperatures have been in the high 40’s overnight gradually warming up to about 70 during the day, which is nice except François is a little cold in the mornings. While we are talking about the weather, it is going to put a crimp in our travels. Everywhere we want to visit between here in France and Zagreb in Croatia is supposed to have rain for the next ten days! We finally decided that we are Oregonians and a little rain is not going to hold us back.

We had a couple of short walks today, and that is about the extent of our activity so there is not much else to talk about. Hopefully the power cord will arrive tomorrow as promised by Amazon and we can get on our way.

There is not a lot to talk about today. Ton and I are both jet lagged but in different ways. I am falling asleep very early in the evening around 8 am and waking very early. Ton is having a hard time falling asleep and ended up waking about 10:30.

Since I was up early and didn’t want to bother Ton I went for a walk into town. It turned out it was market day. Ton usually loves these town markets so I thought I would go back to François and see if she wanted to go. She was still asleep so I went for another walk.

Later in the afternoon we both headed into town, but by then the market was closed, and you would not know it had been bustling with vendors in the morning, just a small cleaning crew putting the finishing touches on washing the floor.

After a visit to the local Aldi to buy some more groceries we followed the canal the town is famous for and came across a group of seniors playing Petanque. Ton tried to take a stealth photo of the group but one gentleman saw her and began teasing her in a friendly way, until he realized she did not understand his French and it was all wasted on her, so he gave a big Gallic shrug and turned back to the game.

We ended our lazy day with a nice pasta meal, and an early bed time for me.

We have returned to the campground that we spent our last night in France in June. It is located pretty close to where we store François, and we really like the people. Our loyalty was more than paid back as you will read later.

This trip had a little more adventure to it than normal, but nothing too dramatic. We decided to try a slightly different route to Paris than in the past. We had been flying a shuttle to Seattle and taking a direct flight to Paris from Seattle. Portland has a direct flight to Amsterdam, and then you connect to Paris. Since it is still two legs we decided to try leaving from our hometown. Everything was on track until the Friday before we left we received an email from KLM saying they had canceled the flight from Amsterdam to Paris and we should contact Delta to get a new flight. I called Delta and the lady who answered said that KLM had not notified them that they had canceled the flight, I told her I had an email from KLM telling me, she asked if I could wait on hold while she called KLM to see what was going on. After about 30 minutes on hold she came back on the line and confirmed that the flight was canceled, and asked if we would mind being rebooked on Air France a couple of hours later, which was better than I expected. The slight delay however, meant though that we could not make it to Sens in time to pick up François, so we ended up in a hotel near the airport for the first night.

Then after we unpacked I realized I had left the power cord for Greta the Garmin at home in Oregon which is a huge problem because as much as I complain about her she is our second most important tool for getting around over here. We visited 5 stores in an attempt to find a replacement with no luck. Ton confirmed it was available on Amazon so as it was getting late we decided to try to figure out how to get an Amazon account set up in Europe and order one for delivery here. When we checked into the campground I explained our problem to Leo the campground manager, and he immediately volunteered to order one using his Amazon account. So our new power cable should be here on Saturday, and once again the wonderful people at Confluence Campground in Migennes have made us very happy.

The cover photo is a greatest hit picture not from Sens. Today was a simple drive up to Sens where we took care of a short list of shopping we wanted to do for some friends, washed François, and returned him to Eurocampingcars.

After that we hung around the hotel and had some Chinese for dinner. The last day is always kind of boring and a let down after having been on the move for a couple of months. But we are already looking forward to the next trip which we are thinking will be Croatia and Greece.

Today was packing and final preparation for turning François in tomorrow. I went for a quick walk in the morning down to the canal to see what boats had put in for the night. There was an American flagged boat, and a New Zealand flagged boat side by side. So there are a lot of different ways for foreigners to see Europe.

After packing Ton asked if we could do a shopping trip so that she could try to find a couple of gifts for friends. So we prepared François for travel and headed into a mall in Auxerre. The shopping trip was a bit of a bust as she didn’t find what she was looking for, so we will try again tomorrow in Sens.

The rest of the day was about preparing for the trip home and eating huge meals as we tried to empty the fridge. We did find time to relax in the evening with a good bottle of wine from Southwest France.

There is very little to talk about today. We spent the day cleaning, doing laundry, and taking inventory. Ton wants to have a written inventory at home of what we have here so we do not pack things that are redundant. Because we had been gone so long we lost track of what we had here, and found several items we had brought over were not needed. Ton decided to make a list of what was here to take home so we can pack a little leaner next time.

The couple who manages the campground love Thailand and when they found out Ton was Thai they went out of their way to tell her how much they loved the country. They are planning their vacation there for latter this year and have already visited before. The manager told us that his dream job would be in tourism in Thailand.

The plan for today was to go to Auxerre. I picked it last night because it was the first city we had visited in France. The first time we visited we couldn’t get into the campground because it didn’t open until two days later, and ended up staying in a campground just out of town. Today we had a short drive on nice country roads until we were about 20 km’s from Auxerre when the dreaded Deviation (detour) sign appeared. This time the deviation took us an extra 35km’s out of our way, but eventually we arrived at the campground. But as we pulled up the place was a zoo with bicycles everywhere. We didn’t know but there is a big bicycle race in Auxerre today, and of course the campground is full. It looks like we are not meant to stay in Auxerre.

We had planned to move to Megannes tomorrow to work on cleaning up François before our departure. So after a quick look at our options we headed over a day early. Megannes is a small town along the Bourgogne canal. It has a nice dock for canal boats and looks like a popular spot for people to put in for the day.

The town is a typical small town in France with a big church, a couple of nice looking cafes and a small grocery. But it does have a really large train station for some reason.

As we were walking back from town the wind was dead calm and the air was suddenly full with tens of thousands of gnats. For the entire walk back we were in a cloud of gnats, fortunately they were not the biting kind, just the get in your mouth, eyes and nose kind.

If we were younger today would have probably been more interesting. Last night we had plans of moving off towards the coast and beginning our new exploration of France. But jet lag and age won out and we did not wake up until nearly 11am, so those plans were put on hold another day.

Today consisted of taking care of one chore, a couple of visits to grocery stores and a nap. Sorry if anyone is looking for something interesting, but today is not the day. Please check in tomorrow as we are planning to begin exploring.

The jet lag kicked in and we ended up sleeping until after 10 am. Yesterday when I opened the door to the service area for François the handle came off in my hand. We had planned on spending the day in Sens to recover, get our shopping done, and get our shots loaded into the French government health system so we could get a QR code with our shot information on it. Not an exciting day but a necessary one.

The first stop was back to Eurocamping cars to show them the broken handle. I told Ton that we would probably have to come back in a couple of days after they ordered the part and it came in. But, much to our surprise they had one in stock, so we were on our way in less than an hour.

Our next stop was Auchan for a first pass at groceries. Ton had already planned on a stop at Auchan and Lidl as she has learned what she likes to buy from each one.

After Auchan we headed over to a pharmacy to get our Contolle´Sanitaire´. This is a QR code built into an app which Europe uses in place of the shot cards we use in the US. While there are currently no restrictions in place in France and the Contolle´ Sanitaire´is not being used we are not sure what the future might bring so we decided to get enrolled. The other advantage is the QR code is recognized thru out Europe so we do not have to deal with the different rules from country to country on the US shot cards.

The pharmacist told us it would take an hour so we headed off to Lidl to complete our shopping. When we went back to the pharmacy the Shot passports were waiting and the pharmacist walked us thru downloading the app.

Our not very exciting day ended up back at the Aire in Sens where Ton prepared a nice meal, followed by a short walk to check out the other RV’s. Some days are full of exciting places, and others are days where you buy food and get enrolled in government programs!

We finally made it back to France. We spent the last two weeks making sure that all of the paperwork was perfect, expecting that the immigration process would be very strict. When we arrived the line was pretty long but we have seen it longer. But, much to our surprise the immigration process was not any stricter than in the past. The only delay was a new automatic process where you scan your own passport and stand in front of a screen to have your picture taken. No one even wanted to see our vaccine cards, or the QR code we had downloaded from the French government. After all of the worry and stress about the new Covid requirements we were kind of disappointed.

The ride to Sens was uneventful. Since we were last in France the company where we store François was bought by a French company and they have relocated from the old farm compound that used to serve as our base to a proper garage and store building. They are also acting as a RV dealer for the French population of the town and not just overseas customers. I asked if they had seen a large downturn in overseas customers and they said no. While we were picking up we met an Australian couple, a South African couple and another American couple to prove their point.

The water pump was found to be defective while we were picking up François so we had a little delay while it was fixed. We were worried about the effect of having an unexpected two years of idleness and the water pump seems to have been the victim. After they repaired the water pump they also apologized and said that the starter battery had run down and not to let the van stop running for awhile.

After we settled the bills we headed off to the gas station to fill our LP gas. Knowing that the battery was low we debated whether we should leave François running while we filled, but when we had returned from our last trip in François we had an extra LP bottle installed for our system and this would be the first time filling, so we decided to shut him down to prevent having François go up in a fire ball if we had a gas leak.

After completing the fill and finding no gas leaks from the LP system it was time to move on. Unfortunately, the time we had let François run and the short drive to the gas station had not been enough to restore the battery, so when we went to start him up the battery was dead. The clerk at the gas station had already been really fun as she broke out her high school English when I purchased the the gas, now I got to test her language skills further when I asked for her help to reach Eurocamping cars. She stayed past the end of her shift and insisted on giving Ton and me a free cup of coffee while we waited. Eventually we got hold of Eurocamping cars and they sent one of the mechanics to give us a jump.

It is always amazing how when we run into problems the most unexpected people come to the rescue. The clerk was our guardian angel and like usual I forgot to ask her name but I will always remember her kindness. She turned a potential bad day into a good day.

Our next stop was the Aire in Sens and after hooking up the electricity to charge our battery we headed out, grabbed some food and turned in for a well earned sleep. We had been up for about 26 hours straight minus a couple of cat naps on the plane.