2018-03-28 Northern Italy and Southern France San Bartolomeo to Couges les Pins

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motorhome route San Bartolomeo to Couges les Pins

Northern Italy and Southern France by Hymer Motorhome

San Bartolomeo, Italy  to Couges les Pins, France

Our stay in San Bartolomeo is finishing, the international dance festival is over, not the event we expected, but a valuable experience.

We are up early and take breakfast in the hotel, then there are all the goodbyes and partings to be taken. We depart the hotel around 10am carefully packing our costumes etc into the motorhome. Then we are on our way, calling off at the nearest town to fill with LPG, confusingly the town is called Andora. The garage was closed, so we visited the supermarket across the road where we stocked up on food and wine.

Having endured endless coach journeys were knew the poor roads would make our journey difficult and long, so on this occasion we opted to travel on the Paeage, the toll-road in France. We rarely use the Paeage because it’s very expensive in our motorhome which is over 3500 kg. The truth is that we wanted to be away from San Bartolomeo, Nice and Cannes as quickly as possible, and if that meant paying we were happy to pay up and smile.

It cost us €12 to travel to the Italian – French border, then another €40 on the French side, that’s €52 in total. When the UK government talks about road pricing and toll roads we all need to think very carefully about how much it is all going to cost us. Toll roads and road pricing put up the cost of everything and the government rakes in VAT on the changes too.

As usual we used google maps for navigation. Be warned however, that google maps always sends you on the shortest route as judged by time, and expects you to be travelling by car. In this case we fell foul of a very narrow road and an extremely tight corner where a local woman was leaning out of an upstairs window screaming at us in French. Fortunately a helpful man carefully guided us through with only a few inches of space each side. We find the aire a short distance along the road where we paid the €4.50 for 24 hours on the aire. There is a warden at this aire, which is quite unusual, a woman who appears to stay in a caravan on the site. She came over and explained the site rules, in French, speaking rapidly. I understood, but just in case, there are numerous signs indicating what is not allowed. To be honest I like that, I do not want to hear other people’s music or televisions, neither children kicking balls and most especially I do not want dogs wandering around off lead.

One thing the warden did insist on was that we reversed into the pitch, we would have preferred facing outwards for a better view, but she was adamant, we should be facing out in case of emergency so that we would be able to drive out without delay. There is no arguing with that logic.

We wandered along the road, noting that there were some signs pointing to the aire, we would have saved ourselves some difficulty reaching the aire if we had seen the signs earlier. It was getting dark when we returned to the Hymer, so we opened a bottle of proseco and ate corn chips and humous, then Gill prepared a delicious chicken stir fry. 

Our Hymer motorhome trip to Northern Italy and Southern France

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Summary of motorhome journey -San Bartolomeo to Couges les Pins