Too Many Towns?

30/03/2026

After Auxonne we had a small string of towns planned for our trip home.

Metz

We drove north to Metz. The snow was a distant memory so we turned off tolls on the sat nav. As the roads heading towards Metz are largely toll free we were still enjoying easy driving on motorways.

The aire at Metz is easy to reach but less easy to escape from (which I will come to later). It’s at the end of a car park and close to the entrance of a campsite which was closed for the winter. It’s location was a reminder that French campsites and aires often live right next door to each other and don’t appear to suffer from a loss of business as a consequence. British campsites seem scared stiff that aires and other motorhome parkups will take away their custom. The campsite here is only a few euros more expensive than the aire. So you can imagine turning up on a hot day and preferring the thought of sitting outside the van and having a BBQ rather than sitting inside your van.

The entry barrier gave us our options. Parking only at €17.32 (the odd amount of cents due to tourist tax), or parking plus EHU, doled out in 8 hour increments. We paid for one lot of EHU – an additional €3 -choosing to use it overnight to ensure our heating could stay on and to allow us to heat the water. We’ve become soft. We paid for EHU up front only to find that a couple of the EHU bollards were out of order, luckily we found a spot with access to EHU. I assume you can wait and purchase the EHU after getting parked up. The entry ticket provided a code to use for EHU and for exit.

The narrow spaces filled up through the remainder of the afternoon and we saw several motorhomes turn up and then have to reverse back along the entry road, causing mild chaos. It’s a popular spot.

We had a nice afternoon wandering through Metz. It’s a pleasant university city with vibrant, pretty streets. We walked to German’s Gate. a 13th century ‘Bridge Castle’ where we ascended the walls and visited a small exhibition. With Paul’s knee playing up we returned to the van and I popped out for a run around the busy riverside park.

The parking spot was quiet overnight so we woke up refreshed. A good job too as we had to navigate the exit of the aire. It looked quite simple. Approach the barrier, put your code into the ticket machine, and the barrier should raise. We had been forewarned that it might not be that easy when we watched someone try to leave before us. Entering their code, reversing, re-approaching, entering their code again. It took them a dozen attempts before they could get out.

It took us just as many times. The code was entered and the terminal told us that we were already outside the aire. Quite patently we were not. we reversed, re-approached, tried stopping further away from the barrier sensors, and tried parking closer. Someone came to give me some manly help, which made no difference. I even resorted to calling the emergency number – which on a Sunday meant calling the police. Luckily the police officer manning the phones spoke good English. I explained the problem and he said that he knew it happened often and a patrol would come around to open the barrier manually – but it might be some time. We continued to try different permutations of proximlty to the sensors and eventually we managed to get the barrier to lift. We have no idea what the magic formula was but were relieved to be out. I phoned the police again to let them know we were out. “Why are you telling me this?” was the curt – dare I say, very French – response. I explained that I thought he might like to tell the patrol they were no longer needed. “Oh, thank you for being so helpful” was his reply. I chose to assume he wasn’t being sarcastic.

Mons

From Metz we clipped the corner of Luxembourg to attempt to get cheap fuel. It was cheaper than France, but still €2 per litre. Not really worth going out of our way for.

Then we drove on into Belgium. We were heading for Mons where there is another Camping Car Park option. This is a ‘Mons Village’ option, which is an ex campsite which has been taken over by CCP. Having once been a campsite there were a lot of ‘grass’ pitches or, at this time of year, muddy wet pitches.  A few pitches by the entrance were on asphalt, and a few more in the campsite had been reinforced with a plastic mesh. We quickly bagged one of the reinforced pitches.

A slight disappointment was that entry to the facilities – here including showers and toilets – was by using a CCP card. We don’t have a card as we use the app, but technical issues meant that the code provided on the app didn’t work on the doors. We could have phoned someone to obtain a card but as we were just here for a night it wasn’t worth it.

We wandered around Mons, but were slightly underwhelmed. The central square has some lovely buildings, but the hundreds of empty chairs outside the restaurants were waiting for tourist season to arrive. The surrounding old town streets had the same feeling of dormancy, awaiting an influx of visitors. Locals must spend their time elsewhere.

Perhaps it was one town visit too many. After Auxonne and Metz our patience for wandering around and looking at stuff had worn thin. Lesson re-learned, you can tell we were tired of sight seeing by the paucity of photos..

Calais

An easy drive west took us to our last stop. We made a quick supermarket stop on the outskirts of Calais and topped up with LPG, then drove through the town to the Camping Car Parks aire. A quick walk along the blustery seafront was sufficient exercise for the day. It was lovely to see the sea and the sun, but the wind was cold. We saw lots of people with bags or cones of frites and decided to treat ourselves to warm up our fingers and stave off the niggles of hunger. We misjudged the portion sizes, a large portion of frites was enough for lunch, dinner (warmed up in the air fryer) and breakfast, if we’d been so minded. But we didn’t eat the remnants for breakfast, although it was tempting, instead we ate some slightly more healthy yoghurt in the queue for the ferry.

Stuffing our faces with Frites

Our journey was all but over. The ferry and drive back home fortunately uneventful.