I can’t believe we’ve been travelling for a week already! The weather has been very hot throughout and much better than our first week last year. We were heading for the motorhome aire at Rhodes in the Moselle department to stop for a day or two, but it seemed to have been taken over by cars and the campsite next door was full, being a Saturday, so after looking at map and checking info from Motorhome Facts Forum website on the Tomtom, we headed south to this gem of a place, with an arboretum and all! Not the easiest of places to find, so if it hadn’t been for that extra bit of information from the forum, we might have had to drive for a bit longer, but we are grateful that we didn’t have to, as it was already midday and getting too hot for comfort again.
We’ve had a very relaxing week since leaving the lovely campsite at Givet with just one overnight stop at the superb Stenay motorhome aire (€8 to include services, showers, toilets, electricity, wifi and free entry to the local beer museum), right on the canal de l’Est, off the Meuse river.
On Tuesday morning, we followed the road D964 south to Verdun, St Mihiel and Commercy, joined the N4 east at Void-Vacon towards Toul and Nancy to stop for a few days at the relaxing Villey-le-Sec campsite, just half way between Toul and Nancy on the D909. We were here last year too and we had really enjoyed the peace and quiet of the site, so we were very happy just to chill by the river, where we swam, fished and paddled our little inflatable boat in order to bait the river and avoid using a sling after Adonis’s accident back in April.
Unfortunately, Adonis didn’t catch anything this time round, but it was just good to unwind. There are quite a few extremely large transport barges and smaller pleasure boats going up and down the river, so maybe that had an effect on the lack of fish taking the bait.
Still, I loved seeing the family of swans we encountered last year, when the parents chased Adonis away from their nest, as all the cygnets are now grown up and they were gliding up and down the river all together, all 10 of them! I took loads of pictures of this wonderful sight!
As we were running out of food supplies, we left the campsite this morning and headed east on the A31 after doing our shopping at Leclerc in Dommartin, just outside Toul (J. 15). We passed Nancy, St Nicolas-de-Port and Luneville to join the N4 again in a north easterly direction towards Sarrebourg and where the road goes west again and becomes the D955 before taking the exit to Rhodes and the Parc Animalier.
Adonis is fishing now and I’ll keep brushing up my French before getting my crochet hooks and yarn out.
We’ll be heading for Alsace tomorrow, or maybe not, if we decide to stay here 2 nights …
Sounds like you are having a fabulous time. Enjoy!
We did, Darlene. We are back home now. I blog after we come back from our trips, as it is often impossible to use the internet while we’re travelling. Even in campsites wifi tends to be very slow and uploading pictures is very frustrating. Thank you for reading.