I'd camped overnight at a campsite that was about a kilometre away from the town of Vezelay. The checkout time was 11am, which gave me plenty of time to walk into Vezelay, look around, then get back to the camper to move on. I left the campsite at 8am before it started getting hot. It took less than 20 minutes on the flat roads.
The first thing to do when I got there was buy a breakfast pastry. It was probably a bad habit to get into as I'd had a small but uninteresting breakfast at the camper already, but French pastries are just too good to pass up. I munched on my pain au chocolat as I wandered up through the village.
The village and its Romanesque basilica are UNESCO-heritage listed, and Vezelay Abbey is famous as a starting point of the Way of St James that forms part of the Santiago de Compostela. There were quite a lot of nuns walking around in the early morning, so I followed them up to the old church complex.
After seeing the main sight, I went ducking and weaving through the little lanes of the village to look at all the pretty houses! It's such a gorgeous place!
I walked back to the campsite to pick up my camper, fill up with water, then hit the road. I was aiming for Troyes, which took me through a little place called Tonnerre. It was here that my Troyes plan fell through. I'd decided that Tonnerre looked like a pretty place to stop and so I drove around to try to find a park. I ended up driving through the town then got a bit lost, then ended up somewhere else, then went back through the town, then decided I'd follow the signs and go to a hypermarket nearby to get fuel and food. The driving, and getting lost, was starting to wear on me a little, and I made the snap decision that I didn't want to have the same problem again in Troyes so kept going - often the problem with towns was the parking situation and it stressed me out. The timing was also important, as it was important that I was at my first stop the next day nice and early because it was quite a touristy place. So I decided instead that I would pick a campsite near that stop, and work backwards from there. That's how I ended up putting Provins in my GPS and going there, as it wasn't originally on my list of places to go. It's part of the problem with roadtripping solo sometimes - you make decisions because you're tired and crabby that you might look back on and wish you hadn't, as I did actually want to go to Troyes. But oh well, not to be!
It turned out that Provins cheered me up quite a bit. I parked the car in a carpark in town and got out. It'd been quite a lot of driving from Vezelay. I got out and wandered around but I couldn't find the old part of town. Turned out that I had parked in the new part, and had to walk uphill to the old part. I almost gave up then and there but shook myself for being silly and started walking. The old town was really pretty and worth visiting, and I stopped off and bought myself some ice-cream. One of the main industries in Provins is roses, and there was rose petal jam and other rose-y food items everywhere. So when I considered the ice-cream flavours, I made sure I bought a boule of rose ice-cream (and one of raspberry).
It was getting late and it had been a tough afternoon, so I went to the campsite I'd chosen for the night. It was down a country lane, and it turned out when I got there that it was one of those campsites that I hate, with people everywhere. They also had a stupid card system to open the barrier, but you had to return the card within office hours, which were later than I wanted to leave. So I discussed with the attendant and we worked out a plan for me to get out the next day, which didn't work anyway.
I picked a spot away from people under some trees and set out to relax. But it wasn't to be as I was getting asked questions by these teenage boys who obviously didn't understand that a woman can drive around France by herself. I was not impressed. The campsite itself was also crap. I went to bed early that night...
Campsite: Les Pres de la Fontaine
Rating: 3/10. Expensive campsite for France and not great. They need to update their facilities, as everything was old and didn't work well. I had a lukewarm shower, washed dishes in lukewarm water and then in the morning, the water supply cut off so I couldn't fill my bottles and the toilets wouldn't flush (gross). Also, I couldn't get out of the gate in the morning because I couldn't seem to call the guard (when reception explained it to me, I thought there would be a button on the barrier but I had to telephone him) and the barrier wouldn't open because I didn't have a keycard. I had to wait for another customer to come by with a card and unlock it for me! Silly waste of time.