Driving south search of sunshine

1st December: Ypres to Andalucía; via Tours and Biarritz

Following our afternoon in Ypres, and having been bitterly cold for several days, we decided to start our journey south in search of sunshine.  

When we left Ypres at 6pm on Sunday 1st December, our overall aim was to reach the south of Spain in as little time as possible! Warmth, here we come… We drove that evening for seven hours (much Minecraft and Roblox activity in the back) and stopped in an overnight ‘aire’ near Tours in France, having just about caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower as we skirted round Paris- many tunnels, many times crisscrossing the Seine! Morgan noted that one of the underground tunnels even had a junction in it!

But on to Tours: France has thousands of these Aires which are usually free overnight stopping areas, with services such as water, showers, toilets, for people who are travelling.  Often they’re at the rear of a service station, or they can be in more picturesque settings in wooded areas etc. Either way, they’re extremely handy for folks with caravans or motorhomes or trucks – we feel safer parking up for the night when there are others nearby.

The other things we are always on the look out for nowadays, living in a van, are diesel, LPG (we have a refillable cylinder which gives us the gas to our hob & oven, but also can power our fridge and heating if we don’t have electricity ) and the all-important electric hook-up, which currently we need in order to power laptops, but we are looking into ways in which to reduce our reliance on that. We think we need an additional leisure battery and possibly also an additional solar panel, but these are big changes to make to a van ( not to mention expensive) and we need to be sure we’re making the correct changes. As we said earlier, it’s a steep learning curve!

Straight after breakfast in Tours, we knocked out 340 miles / 550km, with one stop, arriving at Biarritz at 7p.m.