Aires, Passions & GPS

Our first continental expedition; in the Kerryvan that is. This was to be the precursor to a major 3 month trip planned for 2013 (though likely postponed for a bit now). As well as enjoying ourselves obviously, we wanted to experiment with using Aires which are, it seems, a big deal in several European countries notably France, Germany and Italy.

Aires

In an effort to attract touring campervanners - or perhaps control their parking - local communities construct or install a camper-van service point. Usually built in a suitable open space or car park, the tourers are encouraged to stay overnight and contribute to the local economy as tourists. A number of companies (in France anyway) make these service points though some towns have designed & built their own. Typically a service point might include

• drinking water
• grey-water disposal
• toilet disposal
• electric hook-ups

with some incurring a nominal charge for a selection of these services; tokens or jettons are available from local shops or in some cases, credit cards can be used.

Quite often there is free parking close to the service point; if over-nighting is not free, it is a fairly nominal cost. The guides we used had all the information we needed to decide if the stop would work for us and most proved very accurate.

Aires have become so popular in these countries there are now several small companies publishing lists and guides to these free Aires. France, Germany and Italy are well covered but the concept is now drifting further afield to Belgium, Nederland, Spain, Portugal, all Scandinavian countries, Slovenia. There are even a few service points in Northern Ireland now and the number continues to grow into Greece and eastern Europe.

We started with 2 lists:

• All the Aires: France from Vicarious Books which has extensive details of possibly all Aires in France
• Camperstop Europe, a Dutch publication listing over 7,000 Aires or Stellplatz or Area di Sosta in 15 countries (16 if Nornirn is counted on its own)

In preparation for the trip we tested out Camperstop Europe's listing for the North which introduced us to some super over-nighting (since we missed the chance to get our Touring in Tree pass). Most of this trip we would use All the Aires. The guide worked brilliantly; our usual practice was like this

• identify local Aires near where we were going
• select one or two that looked appealing
• enter the GPS co-ordinates (provided by the guide) into our SatNav
• and drive straight to the Aires

This worked most of the time. Any difficulties we experienced were usually due the SatNav getting confused or the service point being cleverly hidden or disguised. On our second day in France we discovered an equivalent French book and bizarrely while strolling round Morgat accidentally found the publisher's offices.

Either the start or end of each days touring was a search for an Aires or a Passion and therefore the constant monitoring of fresh water, grey-water and the smelly stuff.

French Passion

We discovered about Aires quite accidentally. In the early days of having the van we got chatting to a couple in the Springwell camp-site and they told us of a scheme in France where campers were welcome to over-night in vine-yards and the likes. Our researches yielded details of France Passion 2012 and as it happened the book-seller was Vicarious.

For this trip we intended investigating these locations as well. Several other countries offer similar schemes now; Belgium, Italy and Spain so if it worked, there would be multiple ways of over-nighting for free.

As it turned out, Passions were not a great success. Although we had a few super stop-overs, we also failed to locate more than twice that number. Mostly this was due to lack of GPS co-ordinates and poor directions - but details will appear as we go.

The Passions directory is generally not sufficient on its own. Very few of the stops offer any services so it is usually necessary to find an Aires to refill and empty at as soon as leaving the Passion. Rarely a problem as there are so many Aires.

GPS Guidance

 We took several devices to help prevent us getting lost:

• a huge road atlas of France; both a good scale and a physical large format. It actually included a large scale section to give the context for a region. Despite the number and extent of roads throughout the country we were seldom unable to locate ourselves on the detailed maps.
• a TomTom Nuvi: borrowed with all its accoutrements. We were not sure if it had a European map, it appeared to since we could plot locations travelling from Cherbourg
• a cheap Lidl satnav we found at a silly price. We had used it for navigating round Ireland last year - it had worked well enough - but we doubted we had a European map. It wouldn't be worth buying one for this device, it was bought as an experiment to figure how to assess SatNav's for our needs
• OpenStreetMap Navigator: a app for Android phones and such. Able to download detailed maps for All of Ireland, Brittany, Basse-Normandie, Pays de Loire and a complete map of France for edge cases. Having the maps and all POI downloaded allowed the navigator to work without the need for an Internet connection
• several old versions of Rough Guides covering Brittany, Normandy and the Loire region; these were more for helping identify places of interest to visit and providing some background data but the smaller maps especially of towns might be useful.

Part of our rationale for all the various gadgets was to see how they worked when they were actually needed. Our West Cork trip did not really need a SatNav - the country was too small and known well enough - but in France, neither of us knew our way about. The GPS co-ordinates for the Aires of course made some sort of gadget more or less essential but we had not figured this out yet.

As it turned out the Lidl gadget stopped at Rosslare and the TomTom gave up round about Chartres. OSMand worked brilliantly most of the time though it did need a kick now and again and could be a bit temperamental  and unstable. The Nuvi was excellent when it had a map and would generally be preferable to OSMand for demanding situations. However, we only tried the free version of OSMand and there are alternate apps available (i.e. the mapping was really good most of the time - thanks to the OpenStreetMap team - it did get us stuck near Redon though).

Our other GPS unit - BPS-38 tracker - was in constant use (if I remembered to turn it on) when we were on the move so we have multiple tracks for driving, cycling and walking our way round France. Unfortunately the digital camera does not have either Bluetooth or GPS to locate pictures, images will have to be spotted manually. There is a new feature of this blogging tool that lets me locate the images you will see using Google maps; pretty neat!