Planet Ruby Starrs

It was my birthday - as a treat I got the last yorkshire tea bag! And... the promise to play as much labyrinth as wanted 🤣🤣🤣 cheesy chips for tea... but first an hours drive to a recommended campsite... We (literally) pitched up on a fab camping right on the river Loire... leafy foresty pretty empty... lovely afternoon chilling... gin and tonics.. birthday messages... cheesy chips and steak... we had been going to go out for a meal but France is shut on a Monday in September... fizzy wine fairy lights ..  Dr Fred trounced me at Labyrinth - we had a brief van disco....  didnt want to keep the other campers up.   The following daywe went to have a look around the local town,  Cosne sur Loire.  There was a wee booklet with a kind of walk of interesting places so we decided to follow that.   There some very nice buildings - It's obviously an old town and some of it was very old.  There were ruined bits of a castl...

We left paradis du dombes and hit the low roads via a huge supermarket so we could buy decent tonic for the gin 🤣We bought a moules pan, some ad blue, some dubious t bags and completely forgot the tonic!! Holiday brain strikes again. We stopped the night on a really good municipal camp in the middle of nowhere. Basic spotlessly clean amenities and huge roomy placements all for less than a tenner. It was so quiet - not even that many birds...the campsite was right next to a fishing lake so after tea we went for a walk around it - it was in two circles with a little walkway and a. Bridge in betwwen. A large portion of ithe smaller circle was totally dried up - its so dry. There are a lot of old oak trees here but one had obviously died sometime ago. Someone had carved the remaining trunk into a piece of art. A huge bird standing tall beside the lake... great idea. There were loads of huge fish jumping in the lake. It continues to reach temperatures of 30° pl...

We are back in France. France has never had that much sway for me... We've been loads of times and the main attraction is visiting lovely friends who live here. I'm really disappointed we couldn't hack the heat in Italy and more fed up as once we got into France its just as hot....we might as well be in Italy... We spent a very non descript night in and even more nondescript expensive Aire... just outside of Geneva.   given we had just had two fabulous nights in an amazing car park in Switzerland for next to nothing the Aire was poor... c'est la vie.. We walked down to Lake Geneva but its all private residences so we thoght ... b***** this for a game of whatever and we just had to trespass to get to the actual lake side. It all felt a bit precious... (obviously in a bad mood - reality of odd holiday days 🤣🤣🤣) We moved on to a campsite just north of Lyon.  Dr Fred - understandably is fed up of driving. We have had 2 long days..  ...

After a fab stay on lake Orta we headed via the supermarket to replenish supplies into Switzerland. Uncharted territory for both of us really - I did come through Switzerland many years ago but Dr Fred has never been before. The mountains are majestically amazing With snow on top and glaciers. The roads are very good, I suppose they have to be, there aren't many of them - and there are a lot of lorries.  We climbed higher and higher, through some amazing spectacular scenery and eventually parked up by the giant Eagle on the Simplon Pass. Its just glorious up here... crisp cooler air - still 26 ° but no humidity. We climbed to look at the eagle statue .. sat there watching a helicopter almost land as workers jumped ... then it disappeared over the mountain only to come back 10 mins later with more workers jumping out. It felt faintly thrilling like being 4 yrs old and getting excited to see a digger🤣🤣🤣 .. tbh there were loads of helicopters all ove...

The mountains turned from possible  shapes to solid towering lumps and slowly came into view acrosstjelandscape -  majestic with clouds sitting on top... then as we rounded the corner the lake appeared gloriously aquamarine blue.. we tried to park🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 at Orta San Giulio - as usual no luck whats so ever so we just headed straight to the campsite.  That, tbh, did us a favour but we didnt realise until later.   It was an absolute delight to be under a proper shower... not a camping one, not a flannel and the washing up bowl🤣🤣 - good to get the washing done as well - we can go out in public again now. ... just in case you think its all scenic and fun The campsite Bellavista was good - reasonably priced for the area and not too busy - the peak season here was over so it felf bit more spacious.  It had good clean facilities and even almost a lake view from where we parked.  It also offered an unofficial taxi serv...