Thursday 18th – Week 1 – Drive to Brittany

I'm writing this at 8am in the TV room at our first campsite. The first night went very well – slept like a baby, except when it rained – twice. Anne is getting right into the spirit of things, sitting in the sun reading the Practical Caravan magazine and enthralling me periodically with readers letters about their 1988 Sprite Musketeer caravan, “that still attracts admiring glances from passers by” - oh dear. It's not supposed to be a comedy magazine, but Anne has lost it completely and is in hysterics reading it.

We checked out of the hotel at 9am and caught a taxi around to Peugeot to collect the car. The Paris traffic was absolute bedlam, but we did get to drive round the Champs Elysee, which was kinda cool. We had a couple of dramas when we got the car. The first was very minor, but whoever had delivered the car had managed to give it a Paris paint job – scuffed up rear bumper from bump parking your way into a park.

The second drama was a bit more problematic – I'd left the windscreen mount for our GPS “Jane” (that's the name of her plooty English voice). To compound our problem, “Jane” decided that she wasn't going to find any satellites – none. That makes her rather useless for her only purpose, to navigate us round the place. Fortunately, we had a map, so set about navigating our way out of Paris under our own steam. Even more fortunately, if you have to get lost anywhere, the centre of a big city is a pretty good place, because the first direction sign they give you is how to get out of the place. What seemed at first to be a major problem, was completely solved 10 minutes later as we were out of the Paris limits and on the motorway to Rouen on our way to Brittany. About an hour into the trip after several hard resets (which didn't seem to do anything) and two soft resets, Jane all of a sudden got her mojo back, triangulated of a healthy number of satellites and started telling us where we were. A quick stop at a motorway services had the campground address typed in and then we were on our way to Dinan in Brittany for our first nights camping.

Our tent is a small pup tent that we last used when we traveled around Europe 15 years ago. That was the last time that we did any camping, but we decided it would be a different way of seeing Europe and after 5 years, a change seemed like a good idea. We've come away armed with a list of specially chosen campgrounds – we used a campground guide when we traveled round Europe in the 1990's and all the campgrounds were good, so we've got the newer version of that book and have selected the campgrounds we want to stay in, in the places we are visiting. As well as the campgrounds, we also have a list of hotels that we have researched in the same areas, so that if the weather is bad, or we get tired of camping, we can go and stay in a hotel.

In addition to our tent, we have bought an air bed, air compressor and two sleeping bags from New Zealand. We have bought a mallet in Paris and will go and buy a couple of camping chairs today. We have no cooking facilities as that is what restaurants and cafe's are for.

The trip to Brittany took until 3pm, which gave us time to pitch the tent, sort out all our gear so that what we needed to get at regularly was easily available and then head into Dinan for a bit of sightseeing before drinks and dinner. The walk into Dinan took about 20 minutes by bike track along the river bank. When we arrived at Dinan, it is a picturesque little town with lots of boats moored on the river, with the usual array of restaurants and bars beside the river. There appeared to be a larger walled village above the town, so we walked up one of the steep narrow cobbled streets towards the top of the town. It was only when we got to the top of the hill that we realised that Dinan is in fact a fairly large town, with a bustling town centre, lots of tourist shops, several chain hotels – ibis, Mercure and Best Western, to name a few. All the houses in the town are stone, and with all the flowers in the middle of summer, it's a real picture. After an hour of street wandering, we retreated back down to the river for a couple of drinks and a meal before wandering back down the river path to the campground for our first night sleeping in our tent.