Thursday 4th April – Le Perouille to Pont de L'Arche

La Perouille to Pont de L'Arche - 224 miles

A cold night but it remained dry and the sun was just getting up so a nice pleasant start to the day. The services were off, but we still managed the basics before heading to Chateauroux for a fuel refill which we found at a LeClerc, usually about the cheapest.

But we're now ready to go home so to give us a couple of options we thought we'd get as far as possible today and set our target for Pont de L'Arche, just south of Rouen. The route was on mostly fast dual carriageway that by-passed most of the large towns although we did end up going through the middle of Orleans, fortunately not at rush hour.

Lunch was an abbreviated affair, taken on a supermarket carpark at La Ferte St Aubin before pushing on. It was obvious that it was going to be much later than we normally stop by the time we reached Pont de L'Arche and we did consider stopping earlier, but thought we'd take a chance of there still being room – it is a popular place and has been full before.

Then TomTom showed us some of his advanced properties by warning us of traffic delays ahead, mostly caused by roadworks and the inevitable heavy traffic at going home time. We were held up a few times, the worst being the last mile, but overall it wasn't as bad as it could have been – and there were still spaces at the aire!

There appeared to be a gathering of travellers at the next carpark over but fortunately it had not spilled over to the aire. We've noticed several of these groups but what has been most apparent is that, whilst they still have their big caravans and transit type vans, they are otherwise nothing like their UK counterparts, no mess, loud noises or other unsocial activities.