Easter plans are fluid

What to do with 17 nights in a campervan in April? Trying to avoid the UK's April showers would be a priority. If we could find warmer weather it would be nice and so we decided to head for northern Spain again. With the ultimate aim of spending a week on the Costa Brava we'd be in no rush to get there and could take our time, driving manageable chunks, and stopping at interesting places, some new to us, like Poitiers and the Pyrenees, and taking the opportunity to spend a little longer at the Dune du Pilat.

We were booked on a 9.20pm Eurotunnel train. I'd finish work at 1.30pm and Tony at 3.30. I use the campervan as my work vehicle, driving between the homes of the dogs I walk so I'd have two hours to turn it from the Bark Bus to Cleopatra Campervan. My last two dogs of the day added to my list of jobs when one decided to pee on my canvas hiking shoes - washing and drying a pair of shoes hadn't been on my to-do list.

With Tony home, we set of for Folkestone. Traffic was pretty good with a couple of short queues and we arrived at 6:50pm, getting a ticket for an 8.20pm train - an hour early. There was nobody manning the roundabout and only one person directing traffic in the car park so we decided to chance heading for passport control with our hanger letter 'N' when they were only boarding 'H'. The guy directing traffic entering the car park didn't stop us and there was nobody else between us and the passport check. We ended up on a train two hours early and that allowed us to drive further through France than anticipated.

We drove for almost four hours to an aire, in Saint-Langis-lès-Mortagne, that we'd used before. It was half past midnight and we squeezed into the last remaining space in a line of boring white motorhomes. It has been six degrees when we arrived; we didn't turn on the heater but remained pretty warn through the night, waking just after 9am. A Super U supermarket greeted us as we rejoined the road and we stopped to refuel and buy our favourite five-litre boxes of Merlot. The drive time to our first campsite in Poitiers was three and a half hours - half of what it would have been had it not been for our earlier channel crossing.

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