After our long day yesterday we sleep well and have a slow morning. Breakfast over we empty the Hymer’s tanks and fill with fresh water, the water tap being set into the ground means a hose is necessary to fill with water. It is not possible to take cans or bottles to the tap to fill them as the water will spout upwards from ground level… interesting, as we have not seen this kind of tap before.

We are ready to leave about 10.30, taking D-55 from La Porelliere to Breteuil, then D-833 to Mesnil to the faster dual carriageway road of N-154. This main road takes us north through Evreux and Louviere. Here we take the junction onto the fast A-13 crossing the boucle of the Seine first at Criquebeuf-sur-Seine (first loop) then at Le Saul, taking D-18e towards Rouen and its circular ring road turning anticlockwise (north). At Rouen we cross Île Lacroix (the small island in the Seine at Rouen) onto N-28 north and then A-28 paege stopping around 12.40 for lunch at Aire de Quincampoix. Back on our way on A-28 passing Neufchâtel en Bray to Blangy-sur-Bresle where we cross the twin rivers of the Le Bras Blanc and Bresle. Keeping on A-26 to Abbeville we circle the west side of the city where we join A-16 and continue north to Boulogne arriving about 3.30pm.

We park up at Côte d’Opale Shopping Centre to visit Auchan Hypermarket. We spend two hours doing a large shop to stock up on wine, jambon, lomo, cheese, salmon and crab rillette, olives and all sorts of other French goodies that we cannot get at home. It is a good rest for us and we return to Hymer about 5.30pm. From Boulogne it is only 36km, about half an hour on A-16 to Calais, we drive to the refurbished Aire at Gravelot arriving about 6.30pm.

There are 102 spaces at the newly refurbished Campingcar-Park site at Gravelot and 84 of the pitches have a motorhome on them, leaving only 18 free! There are registration plates from almost every country across Western Europe (except Spain & Portugal), some French, many Germans and Belgians but most from UK. We were very critical of the refurbishment programme when it started in 2024 but, perhaps in retrospect we should have been critical of the lack of information (that the site had been taken over by another camping car company for a complete revamp). I think had we known it was CampingCar-Park we might have been more positive. Pitches are larger, large enough for a sitting area outside each, and offset at an angle so we are not all parked in a long row car park-style and looking into each other’s vehicle. There is a lot of space, a lot of pitches and each has electric hook-up included in the price. You can not find anything like this is the UK; you would be lucky to find a grass pitch with no facilities for the same price.

We park up, open wine and have a starter of crevette (very large prawns in their shells), followed by chicken and mushroom stir-fry. It is almost 9.00pm by the time we have eaten and cleared up, so have a game or two of cards and then an early night.