We have internet! Better late than never.....

We finally arrived!
After a night on the tiles in Salisbury seeing off a work colleague of mine – good luck Sandra!! – we woke at 7am ish to chuck the final bits in the already bulging van and set off to Dover.
Gary Jones sadly not coming now as he couldn’t get his gear up together in time, so we didn’t need to swing by his place to pick it up.
We pulled into the ferry terminal 10 minutes before the off and drove straight onto the ferry. A miserable and expensive lunch later (should have gone in the posh restaurant as usual but decided to save a few quid in the canteen – mistake!) we sat about in the filthy lounge……Seafrance have finally let things slip :-(

So we arrived in Calais and set off on the boring section of northern French péage. The plan was to stop at Bourges, just south of Vierzon and after dinner, we pulled in here at an F1 hotel and got a good kip as usual.
We were treated to the usual welcome strong coffee, fresh bread and orange juice before setting off south again.

5 hours later we arrived at the Millau bridge. When I first visited the Herault with my caving club in 2002 this hadn’t been built and it took 2 hours to weave through the town of Millau. Nowadays, the bridge makes the 12 hour journey nearer 10 and shortly afterwards, we turned off to head to the campsite the ‘pretty way’. This involves wiggling down the hairpin bends of the Viz gorge and taking some piccies and video on the way.

Millau Bridge

This first viewpoint of the ‘Gorges de Herault’ is stunning and you really feel that you have ‘arrived’ when you see it. Of course, you haven’t really, as another hour of negotiating narrow villages with enormous speedhumps is still to come.

Vis Gorge

We arrived and started to put the tent up while Rich took timelapse photos of it going up. Nice idea at the time……














The others (Noel, Clive, Osama and Joe) had arrived a day early and had gone caving to the ‘Event de Rognes’ or ‘Rubbish Dump cave’ as the Wessex Cave Club had dubbed it.

Event de Rognes - by Clive Westlake,
taken on a previous trip

So Rich and I sat on the beach down by the Herault river which is a couple of minutes walk from the tent and as it was crystal clear and warm, I jumped in for a swim as the sun went down.

Rich isn’t feeling great and is wondering if he is ill, so we’re going to leave the diving until Wednesday and go caving today. Internet is being fixed today (Tuesday) so posting may be a bit random.

Rich chills in his hammock

Rich takes in the view of the Vis Gorge