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We have finally agreed that after a week in the job, Sophie is probably best suited to other essential duties, and we will now return to the status quo, ie I aim the motorhome in a certain direction and we wing it. It’s worked very well for 11 years and 40k miles, so why change a formula that works.

That being said, she did take us to some stunning places during her few days in the job, but better a happy wife and we miss out on the odd gem, then a wound-up one. The one downside to our age-old approach though is the number of U-turns I’m forced to do to go back to the village/chateau/factory/cat etc that we’ve just passed.

Today’s first visit was prompted by a village claiming to be a bastide town, which did not exactly have the charm associated with every other bastide town we’ve ever visited. Anyway, we treated it as a walk to contribute to our daily exercise. After that we drove into Tartas, which looked interesting and this added another 30 minutes to our daily walking quota.

We then took a small detour to top up with LPG. Having all these locations programmed into the SatNav makes it very easy to see if any are on the day’s route when it feels like it might be worth topping up. Sophie was initially surprised that we’d stopped at an Elan garage, on the basis that we normally used Repsol for LPG. I had to remind her that we were now in France.

We continued northward through endless pine forests, on very good minor roads, as these are our preferred routes. We were particularly excited to see a Super-U supermarket, which I’d preprogrammed into today’s agenda, in the same way that we found the garage with LPG. We have a favourite cheese that we can always find at Super-U, and after a couple of months in Spain and Portugal, where we’ve yet to find a cheese we like, we couldn’t wait to get hold of our Brillat-Savarin. Also, great doughnuts and cakes, and some alcohol-free German weissbiere, were added to our basket.

So after some more backroads and pine forests we drove through the small town of Trensacq. The SatNav showed me the emblem for a Park4night just off to the right, and there was a motorhome already enjoying the spot. I explained that this area actually looked quite good, and likely better than the other options I was considering. By this time, of course we’d already driven through the town and were on a long straight road, with sandy verges. Sophie was insisting that I simply do a three point turn in the middle of the road, despite traffic behind us and oncoming too. Her argument was that “we’re big and white, so they can hardly miss us”. “Exactly”, I responded and ignored her pleas, which was my prerogative as driver.

Anyway, here we are, the sun’s shining, we’re near some trees, parked on the flat, and it’s a very pleasant spot. Now we have thrown off the restraints of Spain and Portugal, where any action that might suggest you are camping is frowned on by the law, I’ve put my chair outside, and have hung our smalls on the rotating clothes driers, which I’ve placed on the bike rack at the rear. I do miss these little motorhoming freedoms that France provides.

*** Just to mention that our blogs can be up to a few weeks behind reality, as we’re always in catch-up mode ***