Citadel and Municipality

Day two. We passed this last night at Chalon en Champagne, in a municipal campsite which must have been created in a rural setting but is now surrounded by fast roads. suburban houses and hypermarkets – a bit depressing on arrival but with such superb facilities and service that we are enjoying it. The sun is coming up as I write. I bought two foaming coffees from the booth across the pathway half an hour ago. Four small mosquito bites in the night (we didn't zip the 'bedroom' curtain into place last night) and two daddy-long-legs ejected before went to sleep. Magpies chattering in the plane trees, and some distant woodpigeons. This site has a lake apparently, but as it's the end of the season, it's been locked off along with most of the pitches, so we are all huddled near the gates, loos, etc. Freezing a water bottle for our coolbox was gratuit.

Andrew has just put on one of his recent charity shop buys – a huge pale grey sweater. He says it's 10 degrees outside now, and already warmer than an hour or so ago. At night he feels the cold more than I do, so he had extra sleeping bag and blanket layers on him in the night,

I must mention Reims, where we did not stop, but where we saw a new tramsystem being installed. Gaston and his wheelbarrow had some help for this project – the whole of the Roman road entry to the city has been dug up and they are installing this wonderful service, all with European money no doubt. Why can't our towns have these upgrades?

Our main discovery was the citadel town of Laon. A few years ago I was very tempted by the online chance of buying a lovely old warehouse in the town very cheaply but it seemed so far away and irrelevant. Now I wish I had at least come to do a recce, as the place is magic. A great block of (presumably) limestone rises out of the huge Picardy plain, and on it is a vast church with myriad towers and columns and twiddly bits – not exactly Gothic but almost Classical in style, very odd and interesting. Once you get closer to look at it you can see it is halfway between Romanesque and Gothick, what they call Transitional, but – my word – it is gorgeous. The town itself is polished and cleaned up, with one-way systems for the traffic and lots of antique shops and architectural practices specialising in conservation. The view from the terrace road around the top is spectacular. There is also an ingenious and very funny funicular system between the top and the railway station down at the bottom with a single wagon whooshing along a track every two and a half minutes, costing 1.10 euros single or return and excellent value.

OK – today we are heading for Beaune, I think.

Had a shower - whoosh! Lots of hot water and a well-designed cubicle with somewhere to hang your dry stuff.
Had breakfast, chatted to various English - all in caravans and heading home. All say it is much warmer down south.
Was thinking about my shower on Tuesday morning...it was at the headquarters of the Boy Scouts Association at Gidwell Park, where I went on an overnight course. The house is lovely, white, historic, Georgian, set in 200 acres of woodland and camping fields. There are modern additions for conferences etc. and we were allocated to the old part of the house for our accommodation and workrooms. How lovely.... especially the so-called crinoline staircase, the alcoves, mouldings and elegant rooms. The paintings are amazing, mostly showing beautiful young boys in scout uniform in various casual-but-purposeful poses: talking earnestly to a starving child whose mother is trying to earn money making paper flowers, poring over a map with friends also in uniform, interviewing a nervous but upright scout-candidate while adopting a lordly posture and with a Union Jack draped prominently in the corner (this was exhibited at the RA in 1914 so presumably most if not all the boy models were wiped out before a further 4 years had passed). All these paintings which are beautifully painted, are by E Stafford Carlos, who might, these days, be nervous about his constant subject matter - lovely blond boys in knee-high socks and lace-up shoes and with keen dedicated faces. How odd that in this liberated age we should still have these fears. When the paintings were made, quite likely no-one stopped to question any of it.
Anyway,back to the shower... The wonderful thing about it was that the water-part was held to the wall by a magnet, so it could be easily moved. The room was comfortable, reinstated as a proper chamber having once been divided into booths. Being in the old part of the house, the corridor outside was a shambles of doors, steps up, steps down, corners, angles, more of all of those... Fawlty Towers is by no means the only place with such mad architecture.
We had a lovely time there, including a session on the High Ropes, in which exercise I did not do very well, only reaching the third hanging pole while others scaled to the 30? 40? foot dangling contraption. (Though I did well on the written test). Luckily, on a camping holiday the only ropes I have to worry about are the guyropes, only one in this case, tied to little tree, as the weather though autumnal and cooling, is very calm and mild.