Tricky those drivers on the road tail gaiting you constantly. Annoying as well as you want to take it easy and not feel pushed the whole time. Although initially we wanted to stay in Paris a few days and do the ‘tourist route’, we clearly didn’t fit in the underground parking and don’t have the confidence yet to leave TLC in the streets, this might come over time and with experience;).

We’ll leave dancing along the Seine for our dedicated visit to this wonderful city.

So from Paris, we moved on to buy a ladder (see To answer your questions…) and food for the evening before continuing to our first camping stay. We arrived in Souppes sur Loing, just under Nemours at a delightful camping with wifi… but only near the router! This turned out to be the same wherever we go. Hence with all the rain we are experiencing and not being able to sit under a cover, a little challenging to be online.
In Souppes, although bad weather, Saeed kept his head cool and got us going with the roof rack. What needs to go up there? Well, uhm, the chest with tools and car parts, the jerry cans and the water can, and what else? Our suitcases with clothes??? Ok then (not realising we would be banned for the coming week to the same clothes we were wearing, due to rain and no chance to take the suitcases off unless under severe weather conditions and with the necessary consequences).
After these items went on top, we should have some more space in the car; it seemed however that not much had changed. It is clear that we hadn’t figured out yet how to go about our stuff, but this would come!

The next morning, although dark clouds were hanging over us, Saeed made our first cup of tea on the stove, which worked beautifully! Immediately after having consumed our breakfast, rain poured down again. But we still have to rig the stuff to the roof rack and put the tarpolin on! In between rain drops, we managed to firstly secure the items with ratchets and a wire with padlock to the roof rack, and then secure the tarpolin with rope. We would drive for half an hour and then check if all was happy. Once on the road, it all seemed happy, so we made our way to our next stop: a camping in Sévrier. Time for our first dinner at the camp site. As we had bought some fuel for the stove, it now became much happier and our meal of rice with meatballs in delicious sauce, made by the great Chef Saeed Khostip-eman, tasted better than ever!
Every day there is something new we are adding to our programme, be it cooking, going through boxes and rearranging so more can be put in, putting things in a practical way in the hanging pockets in our ‘bedroom’, putting two plastics bags into one and ultimately gaining space.
After our first night of cooking, I rearranged our two baskets of cooking equipment so we have the essentials together in one and do not need to get both baskets out of ‘storage’ when cooking. I know, this sounds simple, but as we had not had any time to prepare the car practically before departure, we are discovering and rearranging on the go. It seems to work!
And we become happier with the day. It also slowly creates more time to start doing other things… such as writing on our blog, emptying the camera hard disk, go through the photos and hopefully soon upload them!