2018-03-24 Northern Italy and Southern France at San Bartolomeo

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At San Bartolomeo, some local walking around

Northern Italy and Southern France by Hymer Motorhome

At San Bartolomeo

We are staying in the Hotel delle Rosa here in San Bartolomeo leaving our motorhome parked about 10 minutes walk away. I shall visit the Hymer at least once every day to check it is ok. This part of our trip is when our English Folk Dance group is performing at an international dance festival, so there is a lot to do. The group has been preparing for this for months with regular rehearsals.

Gill and I am up early, I make my visit to the Hymer and return with a load of stuff that we can store in our room here in the hotel. Then we go down for breakfast. For me breakfast is a good time to observe people, breakfast is where the odd habits, preferences, idiosyncrasies and other ‘characteristics’ of people come out without them realising it. One sees the strange combinations of foods that they put on the same plate. Today it was a scrum, no orderly queue, simply a mad rush to grab food as if they had never been fed before and this was the last chance to fill up.

The food was generally what I would call catering standard packs. If you had done a blind tasting I would not have know what fruit juice I was drinking. This really is one of the problems of motorhome travel, quite simply put, you get used to eating just what you want. We eat delicious meats and cheeses, especially in France, and love the goat and sheep-milk cheeses in Spain. We occasionally eat out, but that does present two problems, the first is Gill’s gluten-free diet, and the second is finding food that’s as good as we make for ourselves. 

After breakfast our whole group assembled and walked to the performance area. The stage was on a short pier-like projection into the sea, which a biting wind whistling across. I got very cold, as did some of the others. We rehearsed and made minor changes to our routine, all the time getting colder and colder. Eventually the whole group decamped to a coffee shop where various drinks and confections were ordered. We wandered back to the hotel and finished off the afternoon writing out journals. Around 5:30pm we opened a bottle of French Viognier that we got from Aldi in France for €3.49, it turned out to be very good, we compared the price and quality to the sauvignon blanc we recently had in England that was £4.50 for a 250ml glass in the restaurant at Folkstone. We finished the bottle then went down to the dining room for our evening meal. Nothing special but we had interesting company, there is only our dance group in the hotel so far, other groups will be joining us tomorrow. 

Our Hymer motorhome trip to Northern Italy and Southern France

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Summary of motorhome journey Calais to Reims, Northern France – no driving today