The rather odd STOP wi-fi system - and other tales

I said I'd tell you about this strange wifi system, so I will. We came across it in the first place we stopped at in France. This was somewhere on what used to be the N15 between Boulogne and Paris, past Abbeville. We went that way to avoid paying the huge tolls which they charge if you use the major motorways like the A14. As I recall it, it was called something like Sinfontaine. Serifontaine, that's the one. (Just found it using Goole Maps.)

It's a secluded motorhome site, up a hill outside the village. You can see it from quite a long way away but finding the entrance is quite tricky. There were a few people already there, though most of the vans seemed to be empty. The owner turned up shortly before it got dark, collected his €7 fee (which included potable water, hot showers, tanks emptying facilities and electricity hook-up - maybe the best value for a private site in France) and said did we want to use the free wifi? I confidently said yes, of course. He said use the one called STOP, it's the one installed at the site and it's free.

It really is, too. However, when you connect to it you have to complete an online form and submit that. Then, in order to actually use STOP to connect up to the internet, you have to open the email which they send you and click on the link. Sounds easy and quite security-conscious, but you may have already spotted the big issue. That's right, you can't access your emails until you are connected to the internet and you can't connect to the internet until you have accessed your emails and found this flaming link.

You can, then, either

• go to an Internet cafe which could be several miles away and buy some time there, then open your emails and click on the link, or
• do what I did and phone and get someone at the shop in the UK to go online and open my email and click on the link for me ( I was pretty sure there was nothing else incriminating in there for them to see).

It worked - and I was then able to connect up and deal with the rest of my emails and pay a few bills online. Seems to me they hadn't really thought that one through. Or maybe they don't actually care. Anyway, I can now apparently use this STOP wifi (which they claim is operating throughout France though I never came across another one) until the end of this year, should I want to.

Talking about good value, here is a real corker. Going down the N7 from Lyon towards Avignon and Orange (no not the phone, the town, though they are probably associated) and after you have been past interesting places like Rousillon, where they do that nice red wine, you go through Valence, or more accurately you go round it. Heading on down, you go through Saulce and on towards Les Reys de Saulce (which is a place which you could easily miss if you blink, Carol described it as a one donkey town which may have been a bit perjorative to donkeys, but again we digress...). Anyway between the two, on the left as you go south, is a transport caff the name of which now escapes me but it has an absolutely huge lorry park which, amazingly, manages to fill right up at night and a big Routiers sign (not a nice twee circular "Les Routiers" sign but a big thing in neon tubes). If you are ever going that way stop there for dinner or, as we did, dinner and an overnight stop in the lorry park. It has to be the best value anywhere in France. Choice of umpteen starters from a buffet, choice between four or more main courses and also a dessert. Plus all the wine you can drink up to one bottle, though nobody does, of course, they are drivers. I think the night cost us about €30 altogether, including coffees and a really brilliant shower each next morning after the truckers had all gone their separate ways.

You heard about it here, first.

Home thoughts of Abroad...

So it all ended in tears, really. Since we have got back, we find that nearly everybody has a disaster tale about Barcelona - pity we didn't know about them before we went there, really! We might not have been so keen to leave the van unattended whilst we did our guided tour of the Old City.

I did say I would include a few pictures taken on the (rather forshortened) trip and now that I have managed to get back to the original Blogger posting screen, I will do that! (If you go straight to Blogger from the right hand click in IE, you go to a posting screen which doesn't give you the option of doing this.) So here are  a couple of pictures from when we stopped (unofficially) in Villefranche, near Nice. As you can see, we were right inside the Citadel and with those walls around us, we felt very safe even though we were parked in a bus park. As there were no buses arriving during mid-December, we didn't think anyone would mind much and so it transpired. The Gendarmerie drove past a few times and you could see them thinking about whether they should say anything, but in the end they decided we weren't doing any harm and left us to it.

Villefranche, with the sun shining and everything

As I mentioned in the lost blog, we wandered around picking up various offspring then became marooned in a Shopping Centre car park whilst wating for the appalling weather to relent enough to get us up to Meribel.

Nord-something Commercial Centre, Chambery

These are pictures show how cold it got, even down in Chambery. We had managed to find a cover for inside the windscreen and the cab windows, thank God, or I'm sure we would have frozen to death inside. This in spite of the super efficient gas fired hot air heating which was brilliant. Although we survived OK, we knew it was time to move on when the security men at the doors to the shopping centre started addressing us by name!

So, we made it to Meribel, which was just like a picture postcard. It had been -20 degrees the previous night, so the snow was well and truly set in place. Here are a couple of photos of the place. Pretty, isn't it? My eldest son Stuart and his partner Louise are working a season there, running a chalet.

More next time, especially the wonderful tale of the free wi-fi which unfortunately needs you to be connected before it will connect you. Can this only be a French thing?

An odd kind of result, really

OK, we had real problems connecting up whilst initially abroad which consumed loads of time and caused endless frustration. A word of advice - don't do the BT dongle thing if you are going abroad. Even if you are clever enough to ensure that you can use it abroad (they don't tell you to do this, of course, but you need to contact them to remove the default bar on foreign operations) it will cost you an absolute arm and leg and many other body parts. Buy some wifi time from People like Orange in the country you are visiting and find a wifi hotspot. But I digress.....

I did write up a lot of stuff on the laptop ready to upload to the blog once we sorted out the connection issues. I didn't have time to do it for the first couple of times that we connected as there were issues of trying to run a business whilst abroad, so it didn't get uploaded. As you will see in a minute, it never now will be!

We had a great time meeting up with and gathering together various family members in various parts of France and Switzerland but we all finished up at a fabulous restaurant in Meribel for our pre-Christmas lunch. Probably only we would think of driving half way round Europe to get everybody together for lunch! It was a rather surrealistic trip, involving nights parked in shopping centre car parks in sub-zero temperatures (-10 one night) and in the back streets of Geneva, but we all seemed to enjoy it - and the lunch was fabulous.

After the lunch the children returned to UK (except Stu & Lou, who stayed at their work in Meribel) and we pushed off south in the van hoping for warmer weather. As we went, we ran first into a southerly gale then into 12 hours of torrential rain. We spent Christmas Day on an Aire near Narbonne and carried on into Spain duly arriving in Barcelona, where it wasn't actually raining or freezing, on 27 December. Several other motorhomes, mostly Italians, shared the carpark with us overnight and the people in the next van told us they had left their vans all that day in the car park whilst they went into town. So we felt quite secure doing the same thing next day. We left at about 9.30 am and did a lovely guided walking tour of the Old Town. When we got back in the afternoon, though, there was a big blank place where the van had been!

And so it transpired. Somebody had nicked it and everything in it. We were left with the clothes we stood in and (thankfully) our passports, cash and cards. There was no alternative to getting the first available flight back to the UK. We filled in all the necesary forms with the police, who were sympathetic but didn't seem enormously interested in doing anything about it.

So we are back. We are going to spend a few more days working out a plan and try to chivvy up the insurance people (Allianz, who underwrite the Safeguard policies) although there isn't much chance of getting anything moving there for a few weeks. We need to decide what we want to do.  My niece Debbie (hi, Debs!) has commented on the last post urging us to basically get back in the saddle and get on with it but right now we aren't sure that's what we will want to do, even when we get enough money to be able to do so. Althpugh the comprehensive insurance is good, we will still be considerably out of pocket when it's all finalised. We'll think about it and decide what to do. Meantime, we are snowed up in Marlow! Been an interesting few weeks, all in all!