And then we were heading for another Beaux Village, Rochefort en Terre. Usually it’s fairly straightforward getting into these villages but not this one. We were due to arrive at lunchtime and as we were in Brittany now I was looking forward to my first galette – a savoury pancake from Brittany. But it was not to be.

Following some less than perfect navigation we found ourselves at the place no motorhome wants to be… rising barriers. You know those barriers that lower to let certain vehicles pass into a street but rises up when others who don’t have permission come along? Well, here we were about to drive forward onto a rising barrier. Would it stay down or would it rise up as we passed? And if it rose up would it mess up the underside of the van? The grey water tank? Or something worse? We would need to turn back.

Not an easy thing to do, as mentioned previously. Added to that we were on a hairpin bend and there was a car behind. Denis reversed a little and the car did too. Then he proceeded steeply up to the left along the hairpin bend. Only then did we see the sign prohibiting motorhomes… we kept going anyway.

Here we passed a lot of parking for cars but none for motorhomes. Eventually the road widened and Denis noticed a huge parking area on the left. There were some busses and one other motorhome, we drove in. It started to rain, we gave up on the galettes and made our own lunch.

Lunch done, we locked up the van but we had hardly taken three steps when an official car (council possibly, bus company probably) drove in and stopped beside us. The French man got out and directed us with hand gestures to follow him. With more hand gestures he pointed to a sign at the entrance. It was a no parking sign… now, to be fair to us it didn’t say – No Parking – it was a symbol for no parking which is basically an X on a blue background with a red ring around it. But as we’re driving on French roads we are kinda supposed to know all the signs…

We looked at each other mystified but it was slowly dawning on us that he was annoyed and wanted us gone. He did a lot more gesturing, this time to his eye and to a motorway sign that had a motorhome parking symbol at the first exit. Ok… so that’s where the parking is and not here? We returned to the van and undid everything we had done to lock up. Meanwhile two more motorhomes (French) had spotted us and were coming in. He went off to give them the gestures. We still hadn’t moved (it takes a while…) and he was back to us, saying stuff and pointing at the now disappearing French motorhomes. Possibly he was saying, Hurry up follow them! These are not words I thought to learn in French… must expand my vocabulary.

We followed, for miles out of town. And it struck us that we would probably never see this beautiful village… especially when at last the French motorhomes stopped… at a Route Baree sign – road closed. Right. The French motorhomes used a handy side road to do a u-turn. We considered our options. I wanted to go back to the man with all the pointing and show him pictures of the Route Barre signs but Denis said he didn’t think that would be as satisfying as I thought it would be…

We’d seen a lot of Beaux Villages, it wasn’t the end of the world to miss one, we could just move on to the next town and all would be well. But I wanted to see this one, especially as it was proving so difficult to get into. We went back to following the French motorhomes and wouldn’t you know it they had found a sliver of space on the side of the road not far from the route barre. There was just enough space for us to park there too and we did.

An update on the barrier – because the road we were supposed to use was closed they were letting vans and cars through the village and the barrier wouldn’t have risen up as we passed. Having said that, it was a very narrow village with the motorhome parking was at the far end and I can only imagine the stress of driving through when there was no way to turn around and undo that decision.

It was a beautiful village, well of course it was, they all are.