Dieppe

Tonight is our sixth night in France and we’re spending it in Dieppe.  The stopover is unfortunately not free, but at 7 euros, it's not exactly expensive and water is free, so we’ll be sure to top up before we leave tomorrow.

We arrived at midday after a quick food shop and fuel top up at Intermarche, one of France’s larger supermarket chains.  1.23 euro per litre for diesel...you don’t get that in the UK!!

The weather has been amazing today; it could easily have been June and not October.  Pete even had his legs out – mine, however, haven’t seen the light of day for some time, having hibernated for winter some weeks ago.  I thought I would have at least a couple of weeks before they had to come out, but if this weather carries on, I might have to bare them after all.

Today was laundry day, so after a visit to tourist information for directions, we found ourselves in Lavi – Clair, the local laundrette (lavarie automatique).  8 euros later, we had clean, semi dry clothes and another conversation with a French person under our belts.  I say conversation, but it wasn’t really; it was really just a French woman talking to us and us trying to understand her whilst trying not to reply to her in German as our French is utterly appalling!  Nevertheless, we managed to understand that she thought we were Dutch and that Dieppe is due a hurricane in two weeks!  We managed to tell her that we are learning French, that it is very difficult, we are staying in our ‘camping car’ and that we are heading south so we needn’t worry about the hurricane.  Conversation’ over and clothes folded, Madame Lavarie told us to drive ‘doucement’ (slowly) and bade us a safe journey.  I’m now feeling rather inadequate with regards to my linguistic abilities, but it’s still early days.  I think maybe I should have started learning French before we got here – it’s harder than I thought it would be but I’ll preservere.

In the early evening, we went for a wander around the town, discovering that we haven’t missed the hustle and bustle of town / city life at all.  One advantage of staying in a larger town though, was the chance for us to finally get some internet access.  We’ve found no free wifi since we left the UK, so we made the decision to buy a French SIM card with 30 day internet access.  It wasn’t the cheapest option but we’ve found that we’re far more reliant on the internet than we thought and it helps to be able to update a blog if you’re going to have one.

After spending that last week in really quite spots with nothing but wind and wave noise, it’s really odd getting used to ‘city noise’ again.  Hopefully we’ll be back somewhere quieter tomorrow; we really have turned into country bumpkins!