We have been camped at the campground at the edge of Strasbourg and then it started to get hot. Our camper doesn’t have air conditioning (few do), so when it gets close to 30C, it’s time to move. I wanted a campsite with electricity so I can run all my fans and not worry about my batteries, so I started looking for open campgrounds online. A few weeks ago we mapped out a bunch of possibilities and found about six consecutive closed campgrounds which made for a long stressful day which was compounded by me driving the wrong way down a rue in a village, destroying the awning in front of a pâtisserie along the way. I’ll tell more about that experience later, when I can find the humor in it. So this time I sent out a bunch of emails to see if any were open and didn’t get any responses. I tried booking one online and it seemed to reject me. French businesses really don’t use the internet in any meaningful manner. You really have to call them on the phone. I don’t make a good impression trying to speak French on the phone. So I gave up and went to the office of the Strasbourg campground and extended my stay until 01 July when maybe I will have a new apartment and a place to park my camping-car. Of course, then I got an email that my payment had been accepted at a campground in the mountains. Now I had two places to stay and of course I had then pre-paid for both of them. I smoked my first cigarette in nearly three months and decided to head for the hills.

We decided to drive to a few other campgrounds for future reference and found them still closed, but we found some great villages we want to visit later. The campground we had booked was at the base of the château pictured above. It’s was the fortress for the Strasbourg bishop between the 14th and 18th centuries. It is carved into the ubiquitous red sandstone in these mountains and is incredible. I will add some pictures of it later that I took with a real camera.

I really like that campgrounds here have bars and grills. The beer usually sucks (I am drinking a draft of something that usually comes in a skunky green bottle right now), but it’s better that sitting in the camper when it’s raining. You will never see a sign prohibiting alcoholic beverages here. Last night, I made Tikka masalla with curried rice for dinner. I also made a blackberry pie in my omnia oven from berries we picked along the fence. I had a big meal prepared and then I noticed a taco truck had pulled into the almost empty campground. Spicy food is rare here and anything being open on a Sunday is unheard of. I had to support them, so we added a big plate of nachos to the mix.

Today, we are back in Strasbourg. It’s cooled off a lot and last night I almost had to turn the heat on. It’s a really pretty day. I’m going to sit here, drink my beer, and try to overcome my genetic predisposition towards being an impatient curmudgeon.