The first leg

Well folks here we go again! 
We left Blighty eventually at 4:30am on 16th November.  After an uneventful crossing we arrived in Calais and headed South stopping on  Aires overnight as we were heading for the sun.
Sunday we had a drive through Orleans, they put their garden sheds in some funny places there!

 
 Roundabout in Orleans

A little further down the road to Limoges we found they did a similar thing when parking cars.



We did check it out and there were no bodies in it.

 
Onwards towards the sun and Limoges we were surprised by two or three cars filled with youths waving and calling to us having only experienced irate wagon drivers who thought we should be travelling faster than 80k/hr, we are on holiday, no real rush.  Our elation at their greetings soon turned to dismay when we realised they were only alerting us to the fact that one of the trailer tyres had given up the ghost.  We managed to stop just after the whole of the tread rolled away into the grass verge, rather like a Polo mint!  No option but to put the spare on before it started to get dark.

The remains of the tyre, glad we have four wheels on our wagon.


Spent most of Monday in Limoges trying to find a replacement tyre and another spare wheel.  It turns out that the French trailers use different size tyres and the wheels only have four studs, ours being British have five!  Had to have the tyres specially ordered to arrive for fitting on Friday, never mind we are parked up at the Aires in Oradour-sur-Glane, overlooking a football pitch with plenty of space for D to run around.

Only us and a couple of other motorhomes, beautifully peaceful.  At least it was till D did his party trick and found a baseball.  Not content with just playing with it he decided to bury it under the fence of a neighbouring house in which resided two very large dogs.  We got to meet the neighbours when D burrowed under the fence in an attempt to retrieve his ball and was handed back to us by a very charming elderly French gentleman who said that his dogs didn't need food on the hoof as they had eaten their lunch already.

Wednesday 21st, raining but fined up in the afternoon so we visited the Village de Memoire which we both found very upsetting.

For those of you that do not know Oradour was the village that was massacred by the SS who were on their way to Normandy.  Around 900 villagers and day trippers aged from 3 months upwards were killed and burned.  The village stands as a reminder of man's inhumanity to man.

The main street.

A memorial for one family that died.  Of the villagers that were there that fateful day only one woman escaped from the church and about five men survived the horror.

One of the many cars which were burned that day.

After having the new tyre fitted on Friday we resumed our journey South making for Vitoria Gastiez, the Basque capital in Spain where our trusty book tells us there is a large Aires to overnight on.