Dead Man’s Shoes, Saint-Pierre-En-Faucigny

Zagan the motorhome has many, many cousins here in La France. According to the ECF (source here), there were 417,200 motorhomes in use in France in 2014, 450,000 in Germany and 205,000 in the UK. In total there were almost 1.7 million motorhomes across Europe that year. And at the moment, they’re all here in the Alps, and they’re all after the free electrical hook-up points on our aire in Saint-Pierre-En-Faucigny (N46.05882 E6.37455)! Just kidding, there are only 8 motorhomes here in an aire for four (hang on….make that 9), but it’s dead man’s shoes waiting for the two (incredibly free of charge) electrical hook-up points. Ju’s worked her magic though and we’re sharing one of them with a very helpful French neighbour.

The motorhome aire in Saint-Pierre-En-Faucigny is a tad close to the train tracks! The last one seems to be at 10:30pm though. We’re right next to a level crossing, which delivers the train literally 8 seconds after the clanging bells announce the barriers are down – no messing.

We’ve done a U turn, and are heading back south, away from Lake Geneva and into the northern French Alps again. Our idea to nip around the Lake came to naught. Why, I don’t know. Maybe it was the bleak weather, but despite the fact the area is clearly beautiful, we weren’t feeling the love for it. Lashing rain cleared the remaining ice from our roof, and washed away a couple of inches of wet snow last night and we took off following an A road west. Along the lake, crawling though miles of Saturday holiday traffic into each town we crossed, before swinging south just before the Swiss border.

Snowless roads on our way south.

Neither of us were fussed about being in un bouchon (cracking French phrase for a traffic jam – literally meaning ‘a’ cork’), as we could see 10 amps being generated by the van’s alternator and pumped into our flagging leisure batteries. A big part of life in a motorhome, especially if you prefer to live away from formal campsites, is managing the on-board resources you have – fresh water, batteries and so on. Over time we’ve become used to this, it’s second nature, but the winter conditions here, coupled with the fact we’re not driving very far each day, have caught us out.

We spend a lot of time using these puppies!

NERD WARNING: DULL, TECHNICAL TALK COMING UP: The photo above shows Zagan’s mission control panel. The gauge to the far right shows the net electricity being used/generated by the van. We’re connected to the 220V French grid at the moment, so 10A are flowing into the van and recharging our batteries. The gauge in the middle shows the voltage measured across the leisure batteries, which gives an indication how full they are, as does the gauge on the left, although this one also shows how many amps the solar panel is generating. Leisure battery voltage is a complex swine to understand, as the voltage over-reads when the batteries are charging (so they look fuller than they are) and under-reads when they’re in use (making them look emptier than they are). But typically as long as they’re in the green region, we’re OK at that point in time. Quite how long we’re OK for depends on how much electricity we use, and before you know it you’re knee-deep in amps, amp-hours, watts, volts, internal battery composition, battery age versus capacity and so on, and so on….

Normally this stuff doesn’t much matter, as we use very little electricity, and run the engine for long enough to keep the batteries topped up. In Dave we had a single 90Ah battery which only got flattened once in two years of solid travel. In Zagan we have two 85Ah batteries, although they’re a few years old, so their capacity is probably far less than the 170Ah when new. At the moment we’re struggling a bit to keep the batteries topped up, but as of tomorrow morning they’ll be as full as they’re ever likely to be, keeping us going for a few more days. Of course, all the other motorhomes around us have the same problem. Some carry petrol generators, but most don’t as they’re noisy bits of kit. All our fellow campers are as careful with money as we are, and we’re all chasing the same off-campsite hook-up points as a result. Today we got lucky, or should I say Ju made us lucky by going and asking the neighbour if we could share his connection!

Yesterday Ju and I pooled resources to work out where on the map we could head in the coming days, bearing in mind we also have need of a laverie (laundrette) and ideally more hook-up before we head for Chamonix. The map’s covered in scrawled notes and highlighted place names. It’s hoofing it down with rain again here, so we expect mucho snow up in the hills. **Intake of breath** which means more snow-driving at some point. Today and tomorrow are likely to be a bit dull though, as we make use of the resources in the valley towns to gear us up for the higher parts of the Earth again.

A few photos from today in Saint-Pierre-En-Faucigny:

There are two war memorials here, within a couple of hundred meters of each other. Two villages appear to have merged?

Spotted in the village – appears to be an automated machine for returning unused medication?

High hills surround us, tiddlers compared to the Alps proper but still imposing animals.

I loved this old doorway, particularly the hand print above it.

Looking south.

French folks have a talent for making the old and crumbling massively appealing?

And one final one! A typical lunch in Zagan looks something like this – bits and bobs we’re learned about as we’ve wandered Europe, all of it delicious.

Cheers, Jay