Explore europe in a campervan

We awoke Sunday morning to -4.5 Celsius (that’s what the temperature gauge that lives in the drawer said anyway), you could see your breath and even the inside of the window screen was iced up.

After breakfast and deicing the van we set off on our route expecting to arrive in Tignes for about 13:00. Somehow the voice of the satnav had been turned right down which caused us to mess up at a crucial fork in the road. This ended up putting an extra 30 miles on the journey as it was impossible to turn round on a toll road just after the Mt Blanc tunnel. To add insult to injury we even had to pay for this extra toll

All that added at least an extra hour to the journey but we just pressed on regardless as we are not exactly running to a tight schedule. After a few hours of windy roads with only 20km left of the journey, the windy road above seemed to merge into a piste. We continued up assuming the road went into a tunnel while the piste continued above. The road got thinner then all of a sudden the satnav said ‘turn left’, all that was left was white snow and a man on his skis. Surely that wasn’t the road, satnav must have lost the plot again… nope, Switzerland OR go right back to Chamonix and pay the 42 euros to go back through the Mt Blanc tunnel.

Once back to Chamonix (just €11 extra for the return through the tunnel) we decided to stick to our plan and followed the other route to Bourg St Maurice, planning on doing the final short stint up to Tignes the following morning (it was either that or go to Italy or Switzerland). We didn’t though; instead we went all the way to Tignes. Previously we had done some research on the internet and found out there was a free camping site in Tignes so headed to find it. When we got to Tignes there was nowhere to park our van, everywhere had height restrictions. Left with no other choices we decided to head BACK to Bourg St Maurice.

In Bourg St Maurice the only place we found to park the campervan where other vans were present was a car park for Mac D’s and a few other shops. So we decided to stay there for the night and get up early before the shops opened.

As if things couldn’t get any worse we then found out the sliding door to the living area wouldn’t close. It took us about 10 minutes to close it and from then on we used the front doors and climbed over the seat to access the living area. Not ideal!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 11:56 am 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.