N45.74001 W0.35543 - ALLÉE DES COQUELICOTS, 16370 CHERVES-RICHEMONT, CHERVES-COGNAC. - Free Aire. Service point. 5 spaces.

We managed to get out of the Aire okay although a couple of people had problems . In fact two people went out on one ticket. The second van's driver either didn't have a ticket or he wasn't reading the machine right! He got right up cosy to the van in front and as soon as the barrier opened they both shot through before it came back down again! We're glad our number worked although it was hard to see the screen because (a) the sun was too bright on it and (b) I wasn't quite tall enough to see it properly anyway.

We headed back to the A63 towards Bordeaux. Paid our last toll of 5.40€. We stopped at one of the service areas for lunch. Unfortunately, at the one we chose there was major reconstruction work going on and so we didn't have very nice surroundings.

I set our destination in our SatNag which is Ken & Carole's for Saturday with a couple of sets of co-ordinates for tonight's stopover. I wanted to find us somewhere reasonably nice rather than a supermarket car park and I thought the two I chose seemed nice. They were both within 100 metres of each other north of Cognac.

Don't you just love it after a long drive and many kilometres of narrow, twisty roads with only grapes to look at you find that these two nice places ARE NOT B****Y THERE and all you've got is fields of GRAPES!

Now you could say I must have put the co-ordinates in wrong and that I could have agreed with for one of them but not both. So, the next suggestion from my poor tired chauffeur (it wasn't exactly a suggestion) was that we would use the next supermarket car park.

Well, before we got to said supermarket, we spotted the motorhome Aire sign of the village we are in now and so here we are nicely parked up for the night with yet another curry in the making (using up frozen left-over sauce from a pork curry, mixed wth the left-over sauce from last night's curry) this time using chicken! Not having left-overs in our van. Waste not want not is our motto!


Toll A63 5.40€ just before J18

Total 27.10€ so far.