Brown and green blobs

You know how when you wake up in the morning and discover you are covered in mud.

Martin didn't tell us just how bad it was. It was mostly due to just one vehicle, a large lorry, which had just pulled onto the road from a ploughed field and then accelerated towards us spraying mud in all directions. There's no escaping it when this happens.

One way to describe our route southwards is 'nature hopping'. For many people the word 'nature' is used to describe a thing, a group of trees or a lake perhaps, but I have always considered nature as if it is an environment you go out into, whether it is a woodland or just an uninhabited area free from human interference. Studying our map of France we notice that there are dark green splotches here and there so, reckoning that these might represent 'nature', we try to plot a route from one to the next. In between these green blobs is mostly arable farmland, some of it full of sweeping curves mirroring the hills around it. but open and empty, crops only just starting to grow.

We usually track down a campsite and aim for it but we know there are also the Aires where overnight parking is allowed and where there are often basic facilities too. This young fellow was in charge of one of these beside the River Meuse but unfortunately he didn't speak much English.

Pausing our journey in one of the green blobs gives us the opportunity to explore and see just what justifies the colour placed on the map. Better still if once there we find a waymarked footpath that will reliably take us on an adventure without us having to think too much about navigation.

Of course if the sun is shining too then this scores even more highly with us but it is really the trees that we need (and the absence of bears, of course) and ideally something of a gradient so that we can emerge at a place the French would call a point de vue, although we would normally turn it around and call it a viewpoint. This was a particularly good one

taking in much of the country we had crossed just the day before.

If predictions run true then our cold spell, frosty nights and sunny days, is finally coming to an end, much to the delight of the locals in this part of France where the Mirabelles variety of plum is grown and a late frost can play havoc with the tree blossom, wiping out the whole harvest. Time will tell.