A wonderfully quiet Friday night, followed by a late start on Saturday morning. It wasn’t quite warm enough to sit outside, but I braved it anyway and caught up with the blogging, and Sophie did a little washing.

We left after poached eggs on toast a la Sophie and continued on our motorhoming guidebook’s “Toulouse et les coteaux de Gascogne” tour, but without the Toulouse bit, as it didn’t fit with our route in general. We firstly checked out my overnighting possibles for last night, of which two out of three would have been excellent, and have now been added to our masterlist of all spots assessed personally by us as very suitable for staying over.

My goal is to have a list covering France, Spain, and Portugal, for starters, so that there’ll always be somewhere more or less handy wherever we find ourselves. So far the list is coming on really well and it’s great when passing through a region to use these tried and tested places as fallbacks when I’m too tired to research all the fresh options.

Sarrant was a lovely tiny village, our favourite type of walkabout. Modest and ancient, yet real and raw and really photogenic. Sarrant even provides a great generous rural carpark with free fresh water, and grey water emptying.

We enjoyed a similar modest visit to the attractive village of Solomiac. After this the weather deteriorated and so Beaumont de Lomagne and Larrazet only had drive through visits.

Montech was on the guidebook’s list, and is an attractive canal-side town. Unfortunately, motorhome parking with canal views wasn’t an option so we took in the sights, dropped by on their Lidl, then headed for my first potential stop for the night.

I mentioned earlier my masterlist of successful stops and tonight is a case in point. We’ve now pitched up at Saint Nicolas de la Grave’s modest motorhome aire, where we stayed three years ago, also in May. There are three other vans in this carpark on the edge of the small town, but it’s green, has picnic benches and is very quiet. The only viable way to park is nose to tail, but with sufficient personal space, and if we have to park up with others, this is by far the best way for us, much reducing the risk of eyeballing each other or hearing people’s TV or music, as whilst the vast majority of motorhomers are quiet as mice, not everyone is considerate in this respect.

Following a much-anticipated home-made pizza from Sophie, we’re looking forward to another peaceful night and an improvement in the weather tomorrow.