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Winter Tour 2008 – Day 4: In the morning we had a beautiful but cold sunrise in Narbonne-Plage which was absolutely worth getting up for. During the night it had frozen a bit, but then the sun was quickly warming up the air again to 14° Celsius. After grocery shopping in Narbonne, we were back on the road towards Valencia in Spain.  At the shopping mall I was able to go online with my iPod Touch again and according to the predictions weather in Valencia would only be good for 3 more days, so we didn’t have much time too loose. Today it was a sunny but hazy day. As far was we could tell the haze was caused by small fires and other air pollution, often looking like smog.
Around Barcelona – a city of 1.68 million – freeway traffic was insane and sometimes dangerous.  I was glad when Barcelona disappeared in the rear view mirror and traffic got less.
Valencia was a bit too far away for this day, so for the night we stopped in Benicarlo on one of the few Spanish camper parks. Benicarlo seemed like a faceless seaside town with summer residences and charmless hotels along the coastline.

Winter Tour 2008 – Day 3: Today was mainly a driving day to make up for yesterday. After a good night, we got up early and drove most of the day, only to stop for shopping in Landres, lunch and a coffee break in the afternoon. When we were shopping in Landers, I was able to go online with my iPod Touch and send a quick email to my colleagues at work and check the weather forecast. According to the forecast we had to go south faster then originally planned.
In the area of Avignon we finally got away from the gray cloud cover and had a beautiful sunset turning the Languedoc landscape orange-red. Around 18:40 we arrived at the Mediterranean sea in Narbonne-Plage. There was nobody there at the reception of the camper park, so we let ourselves in and settled for the night.

Winter Tour 2008 – Day 2: After the night in Hamoir we got going again around 9:30 am, crossing Belgium and Luxembourg. In the afternoon after passing Nancy I got really tired and had to take a break. Obviously I had caught some kind of a cold or flu and was really not up to driving all day. After taking a nap, we decided it would be better to stop for the day and found a place for the night nearby in Chaumont. When we arrived at the camper park ‘Port Fluvial de La Maladiere’, everything was closed. We were able to get a place but could not get electricity or fresh water.

Winter Tour 2008 – Day 1: For the night I had picked two possibilities in Belgium. First we tried the parking in front of the mine museum in Blegny, but the parking was closed with a gate and drunken youth from a nearby pub wasn’t too inviting either. In and around Blegny our Garmin navigation system insisted on sending us through small local roads, which were prohibited for transit, so it took us a while to find the way back to the freeway using main roads.  Even though we set the vehicle type to ‘Truck’, the Garmin routing software has the tendency to use small secondary roads as short cuts.

50 kilometers further we tried the next camper park in Hamoir along the river Ourthe. Going up and down the hilly landscape we had to get through some heavy fog, but it helped to be able to see the route on the display of the navigation system. The camper park was a well-lit gravel pit next to a tennis court, scattered with muddy puddles. We arrived around midnight and were the only motorhome there. Just for the night this was good enough.

Winter Tour 2008 – Day 1: After having coffee and pie in Bocholt, we wanted to make some kilometers but stopped in Duisburg at the Duisburg-North Landscape Park for dinner. The landscape park Duisburg-North is a former metallurgical plant in Duisburg-Meiderich, which was shut down in 1985. Most of the plant was saved from demolition, and each weekend at night the light installation of the British artist Jonathan Park transforms it into a surrealistic post-industrial landscape. Access is free and there is also a camper park for those who want to stay longer.

Winter Tour 2008 – Day 1: This year’s winter tour was inspired by a TV program called ‘Here comes the sun’, which is all about solar energy. Some of the largest solar installations of the world can be found in Spain, and as we did some research we got interested more and more in the area of Valencia. The weather prediction for Valencia also looked promising – sunny and warm – so the main destination for this year’s winter tour was found. The other goal of course was to escape from the annual Dutch fireworks madness. Since weeks people have been firing off fire crackers again, which makes it difficult to walk Jill and sometimes hard to sleep at night.

Just before we were ready to start, Camera.nu called to notify me that my tripod had been repaired. So we slightly adjusted our plans and went north to Urk first to pick up the tripod, which is my lightweight travel tripod.  The store was packed and I had to wait more than half an hour before we were heading towards Bocholt (Germany) to visit by dad who celebrated his birthday just three days before.