16th June 2009

We got up and had a quick breakfast.  Today we're going to see if we can get back to England, hurrah!  We said goodbye to Vivienne and Woody and the bikers on the next pitch, and set off, aiming for Calais.  We stopped for fuel, then stopped for quick lunch on a picnic area and went on our way again.  As we were making good time, we decided to head straight to England, hoping we’d get a Euro train at a reasonable time.  We arrived at about 16:40 but had to wait until 18:20 for a train or pay another €88.  So we walked round the shops at the Eurotunnel Terminal for a bit, came back to the van and treated ourselves to a Magnum choc-ice each.  We then heard the call for loading our train.  It seemed like they were never going to actually call us to drive down to the loading ramps, all the cars in the other queues were moving, but not us and I started to panic as I thought they'd forgotten us.
They finally let us on at about 18:15, pushing it a bit if you ask me.  We then had a row once we’d parked. Because I was worried about the fridge/freezer defrosting, I switched it to gas and thought that would be okay, but Paul shouted ‘turn it off.’  I wanted to leave it on and we argued about it until Paul scared me by saying that it could blow up if the gas leaked.  So I got up and turned the fridge off.  Paul then shouted, ‘what the hell are you doing?’ and I said ‘turning the fridge off like you said.’  ‘I meant turn it off gas only you tosser, not switch it off completely, it will switch to the batteries whilst we are on the train provided you just leave it on auto.’  Talk about you can't win can you!
We gain an hour once we're back in England so will be there about 18:00 and we'll go straight to the Black Horse Farm campsite and hope they have a pitch available for us.  When we arrived, the sign outside said ‘Full’ but I went in and asked and they said they had one for us.
Once we’d pitched up we went and got some fish & chips from the shop up the road, sat and ate them in the van and watched TV.  Yay, back in England where I can understand everything  and we can go to Tesco's tomorrow and get some English shopping, hooray!

Some notes on Western France and Brittany

We’d driven another 1,030 miles maintaining our diesel and oil consumption and with no further mishaps with the van. 

Apart from the awful woman at the first campsite and the disaster with the Ferry to Royan, we had taken this part of the journey in our stride.  I was on more familiar ground with the language and generally the campsites were not too bad.  Obviously we were getting used to this lifestyle.

The weather had been a bit disappointing and was one of the reasons why we decided to head back to England.  We certainly didn't want to be in France during the height of the holiday season when it would get much hotter and the prices of the campsites would revert to summer rates which would  more than double.