It was a little sad as always to leave the mountains but this time it was nice knowing that we would be back and we both felt ready to finish our stint in France and head back to the UK. Rather than hurtle our way back we thought we would break up our drive to London by stopping first at Beaune then another couple of small villages before catching our ferry from Calais about 900km away.
Before arriving at Beaune we took advantage of my brother in law’s brother Thom who has a fantastic knowledge of wines and so was able to recommend a couple of vineyards to visit. Perfect. When we arrived the first campsite was chock a block and with a queue of awaiting campers outside so we ducked off and found a nice little campsite in a village next door Savigny-lès-Beaune. The reason for the popularity of the campsites was not only the popularity of the wine but also the fact that the grapes were being picked by hand and all the campsites were full of pickers. It looked like pretty hot work stood out all day in the sun without any shade!
The village of Savigny-lès-Beaune was a typical picturesque French village and we enjoyed our drives and walks around and of course purchased some wine to take back to the UK with us.
We carried on our journey through the northern part of France an area that I am yet to fall in love with. I am sure there are some beautiful parts but we had decided to take the péage and while that meant a quicker drive we were then just sat on the motorway and the landscape around was a sprawling expanse of flat farmland with not much else to see.
We did have a nice stop at a place called Louvemont which was near France’s largest man made lake, Lac du Der. Here we enjoyed a nice long walk through some woodland and while we didn’t actually end up making it to the lake it was lovely walking just the two of us through the woodland.
Our last stop was pretty much at Calais where we spent our last night of this trip to France. As I said before we weren’t so much sad to leave as we knew we would be back and also we were getting pretty excited about our trip to the UK where we planned to continue our hiking and adventuring around the countryside. Hopefully all our training in the mountains stands us in good stead for the walks in England. T