Musings

Crossing the border from Spain into France became my 2nd visit this travelling (academic) year.

Looking at the map and appropriate route to get to around Toulouse for an overnight stop, I decided to use the toll motorway, and got to a 3-star campsite on a lake near the little town of Nailloux. France is absolutely the best country in my humble opinion for its wealth of campsites and places to stay, albeit many campsites are closed out of season. The site was in a beautiful, rural setting, peaceful, and good facilities all for a reasonable price. What I hadn’t realised, until I was pouring over the map to select my overnight stop, was that I had visited this area 2 or 3 times when I was a teenager, as it was where my French boyfriend of the time came from. It brought back alot of memories.

Bordeaux was my next intended destination for my first visit. I could have done a proper city visit to Toulouse, but preferred to drive on and go across country on non-toll roads. The roads are great and usually pretty empty but this approach takes twice as long for the advantage of seeing new towns and landscapes. The new and enjoyable for me was passing through small market towns like Auterive, which looked lovely, and then the rolling green and eventually vineyard-covered Gascony into Les Landes and the wine route.

Using two satnavs did not prevent me from stopping at least twice to check the destination, given their distance calculation of some 800 kilometres rather than around 300. The culprit was the suburb of Bordeaux in which the targeted campsite was situated – Bruges! – which was found in the satnav databases attached to the road I put in. The algorithms chose to use this and lose the city! It took me more pondering, re-input, checking etc than it should have done before the problem was diagnosed, and then confirmed. The distance is one of the pieces of information I use when travelling for a sense-check, and reassurance that I’m nearly there when I’m getting to the end of driving brain power. Learning is always applied based on the experience of a few years ago, when I and 3 others drove to a concert at a well-known Manchester venue, and arrived instead outside a pub of the same name in a dubious part of Oldham. There were many indicators in the last couple of miles that this area couldn’t be right 😂, but in the absence of knowledge about our destination, and having put our faith in technology, we continued until the bitter end – in this case the darkened, empty streets in an industrial park, and if I remember correctly, a closed-down pub.

In this trip, I’ve been reflecting more on doing significant journeys into the unknown as a solo traveller, 4 years now after my initial few months of extended travel when I started this blog. Also I do keep being prompted to do this by young and older (women usually) regularly asking if I’m travelling alone, and then observing that I’m ‘very brave’. I need to have appropriate responses in French and German ready-prepared next time. Spanish would be a step too far, and open the door to an expectation of fluency which my reasonable understanding but smattering only of spoken competency gets nowhere near.

To the young female british border control officer who said I was very good driving such a large vehicle, I unfortunately had abit of a tired un-moderated step onto my feminist soapbox as I replied somewhat tersely without a smile that anyone can do this whether male or female, that she was a young woman, I was older and we can all do it! I think I was triggered by a whole load of neural networks firing and coalescing around the fact that these words were uttered by a young woman in Western Europe in 2023. I don’t think the same would come out of a young man’s mouth. As I review this, I was, am no doubt being harsh. Still …………

Spain and certainly France are more in my comfort zone than Slovenia and Croatia back in Autumn last year, but navigating complex city interchanges anywhere regularly seems to happen at the end of many hours of driving, and in very hot temperatures despite air control. I do need to take more account of this on subsequent trips. Nevertheless, I managed on this occasion to arrive at the campsite safe and sound, just knackered yet again.

This exhaustion can very quickly turn into happy relief if I feel ok with the place, and it meets my expectations which have usually been checked via online reviews. I am not an adventurer in terms of just wandering off-piste and seeing where I end up – usually heading unexpectedly upto ski resorts on ever narrowing roads. This has happened twice – in the Pyrenees and then the Sierra Nevada. Tbh I would rather avoid, rather than temporarily master the arising fears, to get myself out of there. I do love the mountains, once I’m up in them, so that’s a bit of a challenge I also need to address.

In my case, the shortcut telling comes from the satnavs, and I don’t have any real-time sources reassuring me there’s nothing to worry about. Of course the reassurance wouldn’t work anyway.