Wednesday 23rd July – Dijon, but no mustard

Bonjour Bloggers

We stopped at Dijon as planned yesterday and, as expected; we didn’t get to see any of the city, just the hotel and the autoroute. The driving was as easy as we expected though and apart from hordes of Dutch caravaners and a 20 minute hold up in Lyon the traffic was pretty light. We made Dijon in about 6 ½ hours from Frejus.

The car has blown a brake-light bulb and we do have a spare, as per the law in France. We just don’t have the tool kit to replace it. The Law’s an ass in France too! As we are now only about five hours from home I don’t feel that it would be tempting fate to say that the car has otherwise behaved flawlessly throughout, giving 46mpg even with stop-start driving and VERY heavy usage of the air conditioning.

The hotel in Dijon was an Etap which is like an Ibis but more basic. Unfortunately it also meant that there was no wi-fi access so no blog updates from Dijon.

Luckily we were cunning enough to have bought provisions and a big bag of ice in Frejus so we had plenty of cold beer, wine and food in the car fridge.

After booking in at about 7 we had a picnic dinner on a pub garden style bench in front of the hotel and made many friends throughout the evening. We met a wonderful family, the Kramers from Holland who were on their way to a camping holiday in the Ardeche region. We were chatting for ages with Paul and Ingrid and their lovely children Steven, Kwint, Tinne and Eva. Paul is a biker so he and Ali had a lot in common while I chatted to Ingrid and the children about my sad holiday packing saga. (To be honest, I still don’t think that an electric toothbrush and charger and two ‘emergency reserve’ manual toothbrushes with two tubes of toothpaste – one for the rucksack and one for the case - is overdoing it but that doesn’t seem to be the perceived wisdom.)
Needless to say we ended up having a really lovely picnic and drank way too much, going to bed far too late, but hey – we’re on holiday!