A Big Sky and a Big Lake

Tonight we are parked up in a car park on the edge of Lac D'Orient in the village of Mesnil-St-Pere. It's a massive lake, with a beach! It was getting dark as we arrived but we could see lots of cruisers and dinghys moored up and lots of cafés and water sport facilities. We'll have a walk round tomorrow in daylight before we leave. We stumbled across the car park as we were headed for an Aire about 15k away which is good because we are only about 15mins away from the motorway when we continue our journey south tomorrow. It's also good because it's FREE. On the last trip we spent more than we anticipated on campsite fees because we lacked a little confidence to just stop and park up in car parks. We need campsites every few days for washing clothes but other than that we are pretty independent. Two big gas bottles for cooking, hot water and heating and a solar panel to top up the two 110ah leisure batteries for the electrics and we can go for days without facilities as long as we can find water and somewhere to empty the chemical toilet. In fact we don't use chemicals in the toilet, cheap Aldi bio washing tablets do the job just as we'll and we're not using formaldehyde and goodness knows what else in the expensive bottles of stuff sold in caravan shops. I'm sure you're all finding this very interesting and if anybody wants to know more about our toilet I'll be more than happy to answer any questions you may have.

There's very little light pollution here so there are plenty of stars on a clear, crisp night. I'm ashamed to say I couldn't identify a star or a system in the sky if my life depended on it. Someone mentioned that there are phone apps available to aid identification of the solar system but the down side apparently is that after you've looked at the app your night vision is gone, hmm! Anyway on a clear night like this I think we will be glad we brought a heavier duvet with us this time, it's already starting to frost outside. When we run the heating in the M/home it gets toasty in no time at all but we don't leave it on all night and, not being the best insulated dwelling, it gets cold again after a few hours but the 10tog should do the job we hope.

Medical Update: The Navigation & Comms officer is making a slow recovery and hopefully will be back on top form tomorrow after a good night's sleep and a bowl of porridge. I hope so 'cos it's no fun driving through France with the co-pilot groaning all the time and also means I can't really shout at a poorly wife when her directions aren't all I would like/expect.

No pics of where we are at the moment but here's a couple of the sunrise at Dover this morning.

 

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