Day 89 – at Treffort

The old laundry here at Treffort is a good stopover place. I occasionally use sites like searchforsites and park4night but only when desperate. They tend to attract motorhomes and so need to be accessible to them. Also, if there is a good place it soon becomes overrun by folk using the website, and then a problem for locals. The sites have been trolled also, so good sites can be ‘closed down’ by selfish campers, or more understandably, by local residents. I’d far rather discover places for myself, than keep them to myself. A good way to make finds is to take a hike from a car park and have a look around on foot. That was how I found this.

A few residents pass, many with dogs. Roja has a friendly sniff of them all, and will swim with any volunteers in the laundry waters of course.

I’m midway into the best of my French novel selection, no surprise that it’s Georges Simenon, with an obscure but splendid ‘romans durs’ called The Fate of the Malous’.

By mid-morning we headed out on a circuit I had planned, through the forest to the village of Cuisiat, and back over the ‘crête’, a low lying, but stimulating ridge giving good views.

A group of four women left at the same time as we did, and arrived back at the same time also. Though we didn’t see each other, it did appear that we had done the same route, just in reverse. We didn’t see each other because we both got ‘lost’ at the same time, at the ridge, where the path is very indistinct.

There were also some horses and carriages taking lunch at the laundry. The women told me there was a ‘meeting of horses’ this evening at the camping, with over 300 horses, and their riders, expected. There’s a photo below, which is I believe a sport called carriage driving, with the guy at the back helping the steering.

I was invited to the horse meeting, as the lady whose phone i indirectly helped to find yesterday, passed by later in the afternoon. A pity it coincides with the European rugby final.

This is the third successive year I’ve watched the Champions Cup rugby final in the van; two years ago on the Assynt peninsula in the far north of Scotland with a guy I met in a similarly converted Crafter van, who took a drone video of us both, a year ago in Treignes in Belgium on my way home from Slovenia.

With the Lancashire T20 cricket on the radio as well I feel spoilt.