I last went on an overseas camping holiday 15 22 years ago. Nothings changed. And I do mean nothing. It’s the same tents, the same beds, the same appliances and the same people you meet. It’s the same reps you see over and over again and its the same meals you eat every night.

I really enjoyed it though

Apart from the weather, my bed and Vonnie’s health we done not to badly. We lost out by staying in the middle of nowhere with very little in the way of touristy things we could do in weather we had but what we did get up to I rather enjoyed.

We started off by running late as usual but actually ended up being several hours early for the campsite. Took me a couple of days to get my head around that one. Our plan was to leave yearly doors on Friday morning, camp overnight at Dover and get the ferry the next morning so that we arrived at the campsite around lunchtime. What ended up happening was we left here just before lunchtime, hit Dover just before midnight after realising the campsite would be shut, got on a night ferry and after a brief detour to Bologne we arrived at the campsite at about 5am local time. The kids were great on the entire journey which really surprised us.

Where we were staying was a campsite in the grounds of the Chateau de Drancourt which is about a 5 minute drive outside St-Valery-sur-Somme. Turn that into a 20 minute walk and add in that the nearest decent supermarket/shop is there and you realise just how awkward a place it is to get food. A 9″ basic pizza from the onsite pizzaria that you would pay £4 for in your local takeaway cost at least 10€! It was a lovely campsite mind you with what appeared on the surface to be lots of things to do.

Everything costs money though. Gone are the days of just getting your name on a list to get a game of tennis. Now your paying 8€ for an hours game. About the only free thing there were the pools. When you seen the blurb it stated that one of them was heated. What they actually meant was that one of them had a hose from the toilet block that ran hot water into the pool as and when they remembered to keep the tap on. That was a bit of a let down. Thoroughly enjoyed the pools though, especially the races from the top of the slide to the gates we’d do once we got the kids all dried and in their pram at the end of the day

It wasn’t just the site shops that were expensive though. You don’t get cheap restaurants in France. We spent 40€ on crepes and soft drinks for lunch one day and easily spent that on 2 omelette’s and 2 cheeseburgers with drinks as well. This meant we spent our evenings enjoying either home tent cooked pasta or BBQ’s. As you can guess I really enjoyed the BBQ’s seeing as the first one I made with only charcoal and nothing other than a couple of matches to get it going. We finally managed to get firelighters but sill it took a good 20 minutes to get the damn thing going each time! We soon got fed up of kebabs and burnt burgers though.

We did do something other than complain though

The region we were staying in has a narrow gauge railway that links up the entire bay with the national rail network. The link from St Valery to Cayeux-sur-mer is a separate line but is run by a diesel train so we went on the longer journey on steam train to Le Crotoy on the other side of the bay. It took us an hour each way and the kids loved every second of it. In fact I loved it as well. Theres something about standing on the kickplate at the end of a carriage or hanging out a window as the steam train takes you through the countryside that just makes you smile no matter how old you are.

We also went to Nausica in Bologne on our last day. Take the Sealife centres in the UK and make them about 10 times bigger and you’ve got this place. You don’t have as large a shark tank as the one on the Firth of Forth but everything else is bigger. It was also about half the price of that Sealife centre as well!

The journey home was interesting. We weren’t supposed to get the ferry until Wednesday night but after chancing our arms again we got on the 5pm ferry to Dover and drove through the night getting home at about 5am. That was some drive on Vonnie’s part with only a wee stop over at Stratford Services for a wee rest.

There are far more photos (we only just finished uploading all 800 odd of them to Flickr yesterday) but I need to dig through them and delete those that are either crap or embarrassing. Theres also a few I’d like to hit with Lightroom/Photoshop before to many folk see them as well. Those that are interested will get to see them soon though… I promise.

Tags: food, France, GBP, rail network, United Kingdom

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 5:14 am and is filed under Every Day Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.