Wine Tour of France

Before leaving the UK we joined France Passion, an initiative of French winemakers and farmers allowing campervans to stay on farms and vineyards for free. It was fantastic, we’d turn up at a vineyard, introduce ourselves, meet the owners, get a private tour and tasting leading to the purchase of a couple of bottles of wine to be enjoyed whilst camping amongst the vines…perfect!

Our first tour of France therefore involved staying on as many vineyards as possible. We started on a farm in the north east, camped by the fluffy rabbits – which we then realised where rather big and not domestic pets at all…

Then we moved into the Champagne region, where a rather commercial and gimmicky tour of the caves of the Moet et Chandon Champagne House was followed by an amazing tour, in French, of the caves and vines owned by our hosts. We stayed on his land and camped at the side of the vines, which made for a fantastic evening.

After buying as much champagne as we could fit in the van we moved on to the Loire Valley where we spent a couple of days riding and touring the châteaux’s.

Here we also discovered the French Aires – places where campervans can stay overnight for free, great when you arrive late and the campsite gates are closed. We stayed at an Aire in Blois, right by the river overlooking the bridge into town – there was no better site in town!

We then moved on to Dordogne, where we met up with my uncle and aunt and several of their friends who were staying in a gorgeous old manor house. We were very jealous at the bedrooms, lounge and kitchen that you could move around in – but we had the last laugh when saying goodbye for them all to go back to work whilst we moved on with our travels.

The Dordogne area was something of a surprise for me as I hadn’t been aware of all the medieval towns that are cut into the rocks.

We were both astounded at the engineering feats and spent several afternoons wandering around. We made it to the market in Sarlat, where the cheese man propositioned us both and got an 18 Euro sale of very smelly cheese for his efforts!

To get across to Italy we went through the Massif Central, which was absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, it rained a lot whilst we were there which both curtailed our cycling plans and also led to new adventures with Fernando…The first night we drove into a campsite and found a secluded spot – which we got onto but then discovered that the ground was very soft, and Fernando was going nowhere. Two families walking past tried to help push us out, but to no avail. By chance, one of the men was the local farmer, so off he went to get the tractor and pull us out – much to our relief! After camping on some firmer ground we moved on…

The next night we stopped and carefully picked our spot. It then poured down all night and in the morning, Fernando dug his wheels in and we were going nowhere. This time there was no farmer around, and Lou and I spent 2 hours digging and trying to get planks under our wheels in the pretense that we knew how to get out of this mess. Eventually a local with a landrover lent a hand, and after much towing, revving and burning rubber got Fernando out!