Ever seen those funny bottles of spirits that look like the holy hand grenade of Antioch? Chambord it’s called, never tried it myself but the reason I mention is because we are off to Chateau Chambord, the inspiration for said raspberry liqueur.

It’s a 4.5 hour journey from camp naked, we set off about 11 aiming to be at the Aire we had selected for an evenings stay by around 4pm.

Nothing much happened on the journey asides from the traffic being rubbish so we stopped for a romantic picnic by the Carrefour sign next to the motorway, as soon as we stopped the traffic cleared.

When we arrived at the Aire it wasn’t quite as described, next to a main road with no toilet facilities, this would not do so we had a look round and handily 500 meters up the road was a great little campsite called camping de chatillon, 19 euros with electric for the night, sweet. Something I’ve encountered a couple of times here is reverse polarity on hook ups, same deal here tho luckily the campsite owner had an adaptor we could borrow for the night, if you are planning a trip to France I would recommend having one on board.

Our pitch was a small modest affair.

  
We went for a wander around the local vinyard and corn fields, returned to the van and lolly made some kick ass pasta. I had a rubbish nights sleep, one because of the massive storm that kept me up and two, I was racking my brains to figure out a solution to my ongoing battle with the fridge.

We woke up, grabbed a shower and made our way to the local boulangerie for breakfast, we then parked up the van and cycled to Chambord, an easy 30 minute ride on dedicated cycle tracks, they love cycling over here!

The chateau is a truly beautiful building and one that strangely looks better from the back than the front.

We grabbed an audio guide and spent the next couple of hours wandering about the place learning who built which bit, who’s bedroom was here and what the king got up to when he didn’t fancy shagging the queen, so the rumour goes.

There is an incredible staircase which is the center piece of the chateau, it’s a staircase within a stair case which means one person can go up while the other goes down and you will never meet, this is the view from the bottom.

Chambord iswell worth a visit as is the souvenir shop, they have tasters for every box of biscuits they sell, we tried them all.

We jumped on our bikes and headed back to the van a lot later than we’d anticipated, we hit the road for our last stop on our trip, Plage merlimont.

I finally figured out what to do with the fridge, this bits for camper owners. All the forums will say wire your weaco fridge directly to your leisure battery. I have a PMS 3 in my van and the problem with this is when you are hooked up the pms3 is trying to send the leisure battery a charge whilst at the same time the fridge is draining it more than the PMS supplied charge, the result is when you leave the battery got little to no charge and your fridge fails shortly after. What I have done is wire the fridge to an aux 12v output that’s built into the PMS3, I get no voltage drop so the fridge works. When it’s hooked up to 240v the fridge receives its 12v supply from the PMS unit, not the battery, this then allows the battery to receive a top up charge, simples!