Explore europe in a campervan

The rain has continued to fall which is making the pistes very slow and us very wet. So snowboarding hasn’t been as much fun.

On Wednesday morning we went to the weekly market in Morzine, just to have a look round as we have known of it’s existence for weeks, but never found the time to check it out. The market stalls consisted of mainly clothes, butchers and stalls selling those dried sausages & cheese. We get lots of French markets in the UK now, but the stalls selling sausage and cheese here were quite impressive, they had a huge range and mountains of stock. There was also a stall that just sold grandfather clocks!

Afterwards we decided to get some internet in the local internet café. It was a waste of time in terms of internet usage because so many people were at home using the internet instead of being out in the rain. We did manage to use this time to fully charge our laptops and mobile phones, so it wasn’t a total waste.

I managed to borrow an iron from our English friends Mike and Gwyd so that I could wax my snowboard. I have never waxed my own board before, as I usually pay someone else to do the job. I’m sure I paid around £15 when I last had mine done, so it would work out quite expensive for us both to have our boards waxed by someone else every month. It wasn’t a difficult job. I had a snowboard DVD with an article on waxing your own board so I just followed that. I used the iron to melt the wax so I could chalk it onto the underside of the board; then used the iron directly on the board to evenly distribute the wax around the board; once the wax was dry the next day I just scraped off some excess and buffed it up slightly with a scouring pad. So that’s some money saved!

We awoke the next day to more rain so decided it wasn’t worth getting up and slept in until 2!

Batteries were running low by now so we decided to try out a campsite in St Jean d’Aulps called ‘Camping Caravaneige Le Solerey’. The campsite was great, booking in was straight-forward and the facilities very good. Even better was the fact that we could get an excellent internet connection using our wi-fi antenna. So we stayed up all night until 6 in the morning getting some things done on the internet and updating our laptops with the latest service packs and virus scanners, which was long overdue!

When we did finally awake in the morning around 11 we found out that the washing facilities on the campsite cost €8 less than we pay at our usual place in Morzine. So we’ll definitely be back to this campsite again.

After spending extra time in the van due to the rain once it stopped we decided to have a walk along the river where the van was parked, we found an ‘Indiana’ Adventure park with rope bridges and zip wires for me to swing in the trees like a monkey! And we also found an equestrian center with some nice horses.

That night we went round Mike and Gwyd’s to watch some movies and have a few beers. They drive a huge black Mercedes campervan that Mike converted himself. The van can run on diesel or vegetable oil, has a wood burning stove, garage and even a set of record decks that drop down from over the cab!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.