23/09/09

Day 15 – September 23
Lesson learned – the sun can be very deceptive, even at this time of year, and we both caught it yesterday, my face being the proverbial Belisha beacon today – sorry Jean, so ageing!
This being the case we have decided to use this as a travelling day to move south, much as it grieves us not to be enjoying the sun. This countryside, the Marais, is not very inspiring, being very flat much like our Fens and the only break in the landscape being grazing cattle which are mainly Charolais, the odd horse, and many single storey farm buildings. I read a novel some time ago by Joanne Harris, called “Coastliners”, about this area and her descriptions are very accurate and totally in keeping with our experiences of today.
We have ended up, courtesy of our ever demanding sat nav, at La Tranche sur Mer. This town has many happy memories for us as we brought the children here on holiday nearly 20 years ago, and consequently met our very dear friends Chris and Gary and their three children here. It has also invoked less happy memories, but this is not the place for those.
We tried to get on an aire near the lighthouse which is supposedly for a 48 hour maximum stay but it was completely full, and some of the motorhomes there looked well established and entrenched, beyond 48 hours for sure. We have ended up on another aire closer to the town and we walked from here along the banks of a stream and watched three otters at play – never seen that at home! At least I think they were otters – they may have been large rats….
On a more concerning note, we decided to top up the LPG tank today whilst we could find it, as supplies are reportedly intermittent in France. It turns out that despite assurances that we had the correct fitting, we have not – our mission now is to find one that is, or live on salad and take cold showers for the next 3 weeks, because we rely on gas for cooking and hot water! I exaggerate, it isn’t essential yet, but the gauge in our tank doesn’t work so we don’t know how much we have left – time will tell, we’ll just see how it goes.
Also of note, Peter has splashed out on some new espadrilles….