Friday 6 January 2023 – Roullet St Estephe to Oleron St Marie

Early start again and much refreshed so breakfast, service the van and on our way back to the N10 towards Bordeaux. With an excellent weather forecast we decided to transit the Pyrenees via the Somport Tunnel which, apart from avoiding the chaos at the coastal border crossing, put us on a more direct routing for our proposed first full stop in Spain, at Valencia.

The Bordeaux ring road was very busy but no hold-ups and we soon departed onto the A63 autoroute which for the next 50km or so was free. At the last exit before the peage TomTom turned us off towards Mont de Marson. We've travelled this route before and our memory was of not so good roads but apart from a lack of the more usual long straight stretches we're accustomed to in France it was an excellent run with hardly any traffic, passing through pretty small villages.

However we were really in need of some shopping and of course there was a complete lack of the supermarkets we favoured so as our normal lunchtime stop was well past instead we pulled off onto a lay-by for our break. Around an hour after resuming we spotted a sign for an Intermarche at a roundabout and followed it. Unfortunately Colin and Tina had dropped back a little and didn't see us turn but a quick phone call got them turned round and a position report brought them back to us. Isn't the What Three Words app useful?

Groceries restocked we also took the opportunity of refuelling with reasonably priced diesel but we were now around an hour adrift of our plans with quite a lot of small cross-country roads still to follow and few alternatives for our planned overnight stop. But it was a pleasant day, the sun was shining and the scenery including the approaching Pyrenees mountains was enjoyable. Faithfull TomTom navigated us to the Aire in Oleron St Marie with only a tiny misjudgement at the end but having been here before we easily corrected it. A narrow gateway led us into a 7-place motorhome parking area with 2 units already in place so we manoeuvred ourselves in, followed shortly by three others so we were just in time. This justified our decision to always be parked up by 4.00pm; in this case the next available place was an hour away with no guarantee there would be space there.

Being up in the foothills meant that despite the warm sunshine of the afternoon, it quickly turned cool so after our usual cuppa, cake and chat we retired early.