We opened up our bedroom window and behold:

But it is lovely and quiet in the morning, so we decided to go for a walk.

Through the snow, testing our camera's and film a little walk story. The snow sits lovely on the trees and the grass. Found a small hidden tiny cottage. Not a bad place to be.

Goodbye Luxembourg

France is only a two hours drive from here. So we decide to do just that. We have no plans for Luxembourg, and Luxembourg has no plans for us. Maybe some other time. It is a lovely country nonetheless. Reminds us of Switzerland. Hilly landscape with green meadows, neatly trimmed lush forests, beautiful well preserved buildings. It is a rich country. It is also a bit Dutch, due to the BENELUX economical alliance that exists for a long time.

Bonjour France

At first we wanted to approach Italy via Germany. But at the last moment we decided to travel through France. This for two reasons: First, we do not like to drive through the Alpes in winter. We have done this twice, and twice we where buried in snow and where forced to drive under really bad conditions.

Second: we are Member of the European Farmer-for-Camper networks 2023 for Germany (Landvergnugen), Italy (Agricamper Italy) and France (France -Passion).

But the catalogue of both Italy and Germany are at time of writing not send to us, so we have no vignet and can't proove we are a member of their club.

France-Passion

So what is the deal? It is a both simple as brilliant formula. The farmers offer you a free stay on their property provided you buy some of their goods. This can be anything: dairy products like milk and chees, but also carnivore products such as meat, sausages, of pate's, or more traditional products oils and wines and liquier. This is an entirely Campervan based network. The farmers are not campings, they simply offer you a refuge for one night. The only thing you really need to do is say:"Bonjour-" when you arrive, and "Au Revoir- " when you leave.

We ae about to find this out!

L'Ambroisie

Lambroisie is a small vineyard at the edge of Toul. We phoned the owner, drove to Toul and parked on his premise. Nothing much really, just a parking space next to his bottlestack. Great herd of crows on the trees above.

We forfilled our part of the deal and bought two bottles of wine gris (both after being heavily seduced to take a large gulp:" Mais non, non! I Insist!"...and is only 3 pm. He forfills his part os the deal and leaves us in piece for the rest of the period. It works! France Passion rules!

MIFI & Hawkeye

We have done some modifications to our RV. More on that on later time, but one is of particular interest: our battery charged surveillance camera. Sometimes you come up with plans that don't work, because you haven't given it enough thought, you haven't got the skills or did not investigate properly. Our surveillance camera to my surprise works for the full 100%. I wanted a cloudbased, mailbased, notification based and FTP based solution that takes 5V DC and offers enough resolution and viewing angle to constantly keep an eye on things while uploading realtime footage to my own private cloud. Now this may sound like a lot of hocus pocus, but in reality it all boils down to finding the right tools.

So we bought a datapackage of 400Gb per month for all over Europa. We put it inside a TPLink 760 MIFI device. Now we have our own private Birdhouse network. We connected a REOLINK Surveillance camera. We've setup a remote FTP server uploading in realtime data to our own cloud whenever we are further away from our Birdhouse. I dont have this camera running at all times, only when we are away. And I must say: it works beautiful.

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Above is some footage: we returned after a walk. The camera started recording the minute it notices a change in the lighting conditions. Immidiately followed by numerous push messages on our phone and instant upload to the FTP - server. Nice! We can set it up so that it makes a lot of noise too, and we can talk through the camera long distance.