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I (John) first went to France in September 1969 to work for 9 months as an Assistant (teaching English) in a school in the up-market seaside town of Le Touquet (casino, race course, airport, lots of fancy villas, shops and restaurants).

In Easter 1970 Richard joined me for a 2-week tour of Brittany and central France in my VW Beetle. This started badly by his not arriving at the due time in Boulogne as planned! Some considerable time later he arrived in Calais (I forget why) and, using his rusty O-Level French, managed to phone a message to a colleague of mine. One of the memorable places we visited on this tour was Le Mont St Michel in Normandy, shown above. This remarkable citadel is well worth a visit though nowadays it gets terribly busy.

Another memory of that holiday is getting the Beetle stuck in soft sand outside the town of Les Sables d'Olonne. As the French speaker, I walked into town to get help. On return with a tow-truck, the Beetle was nowhere to be seen, Richard having extricated it with the help of a passing motorist and then driven into town, looking for me. He soon turned up, much to my embarrassment! I can't remember if we were charged for the call-out. That same evening we stayed at a remote youth hostel (a converted water-mill in a deep valley) where there were no other guests (and no warden for that matter, so we never paid.). The hostel had a permanently flushing toilet (a hole in a bench above the river), a fact recorded in Richard's meticulous diary! The diary also records the fact that we didn't pay the following night at the hostel in Tours, but that appears to have been intentional on our part!

  See a list of the countries which Richard visited.