27/09/09

Day 19 – September 27
After writing yesterday’s blog we were treated to the most wonderful sunset promising another lovely day today. The vines looked amazing this morning, their dead straight lines drenched in bright sunshine, so we were not disappointed.
We took our leave of Ile d’Oleron, past the oyster and mussel beds that provide the majority of employment here, and decided to take a short cut by catching the ferry from Royan across to Pointe de Grave, cutting out driving through Bordeaux. This was quite expensive, but probably saved us a couple of hours driving and numerous kilometres, so on balance it was well worth it.
We are now in Gironde. This area has been reclaimed from marshland and now consists of hundreds of square kilometres of planted pine forests, resulting in a range of forest walks and a National Park. The roads have been cut through in virtually straight lines, allowing fast progress, only occasionally interrupted by sleepy villages enjoying a peaceful sunny Sunday. Flowers are still in profusion in even the smallest village, and this makes everywhere so much brighter and pretty. The houses in this area are also markedly different to the single storey farm type dwellings we have recently passed by, being far more upmarket and in large well kept gardens.
Tonight we have stopped on a campsite as this area appears to be devoid of aires and France Passion locations, the latter probably due to the lack of agriculture here.
We are close to the Dune du Pyla, which is a natural formation of windblown sand resulting in an enormous sand dune of 100 metres in height. We walked down it tonight, and it was like ski-ing a black run, with the sand slipping away from beneath our feet! Walking back up from the beach was somewhat less exciting….. The Atlantic here seems quite calm, which is hopefully a good sign for weather to come – maybe another day on the beach before we turn inland – but not down that dune!
On the way back to the site, which is situated in a pine forest, we spotted a red squirrel high up in the trees – another first for me, to add to the La Tranche otters!
Another fabulous sunset tonight, so fingers crossed for another good day tomorrow!

26/09/09

Day 18 – September 26
Not the first away from the aire this morning and despite the forecast for cloud we have enjoyed brilliant sunshine again today. We left La Tranche by the road we thought led to the campsite we stayed at 20 years ago, only to find that we were on a new bypass. We eventually found our way back to the original road and can report that the campsite is still exactly where we left it!
Our next stop was La Rochelle. This is a lovely port and one of my favourite places, as it seems to me to be the gateway to southern France. Full of cafes, bars, restaurants and very upmarket shops – even a Galleries Lafayette – it has a very cosmopolitan atmosphere in a historic setting dating back to the 11th century. Peter and I laughed together as we walked along the quayside at a photograph we have of Sophie as a chubby two-year old with a mass of blonde curls, clambering on a bench there all those years ago – sorry Soph!
We found the market and spent quite a while browsing round admiring food – one of our favourite pastimes! There were many fish stalls selling oysters, mussels, langoustines and every other seafood imaginable cheek by jowl with fantastic meat and charcuterie stands and vegetable stalls with magnificent colourful displays of their produce in huge baskets as centrepieces. Everything looks so fresh and appetising!
Leaving here we tried two camping accessory shops to try to get an LPG filler adapter, but they couldn’t help nor make any suggestion who could. Fingers are well and truly crossed that the gas will hold out, and needless to say our gas usage is now very frugal!
Our original plan tonight was to stay at an aire at Boyardville on Ile d’Oleron which overlooks Fort Boyard, the venue for the TV challenge show, but when we arrived we found that the aire has been closed – great!
So we have ended up using our France Passion membership for the first time tonight. This allows us to stay at a variety of participating rural locations, usually farms or vineyards, and so we find ourselves fortunate enough to still be able to sit outside in very warm evening sunshine with our G&Ts, this late in September, in a huge vineyard. What bliss!

25/09/09

Day 17 – September 25
Sorry, a bit of a slow news day today!
The bikes came out again this morning – deep joy – and we headed off for another beach day. Whilst the sun has been out it has been very hot, but there has been considerably more cloud around, maybe a sign of things to come? Additionally there has been quite a brisk breeze, so overall quite a bit cooler.
We decided to treat ourselves to lunch out today. We have had to limit ourselves quite strictly in this respect. When we are on holiday usually it is a case of “where” rather than “if”, but we can’t allow ourselves to get carried away in the holiday spirit or we would be swiftly out of budget and heading home early!
We had lunch at a beachfront restaurant we had spotted yesterday, having the set lunch menu which was nonetheless beautifully presented – the omni-present moules, this time slightly curried, followed by a very thick steak of cod which was absolutely delicious. The dessert was an ice cream/meringue/whipped cream concoction – needless to say I donated mine to Peter! The wine was more expensive than the menu, but so what??!
We have packed the bikes – hurray! – ready to move off quite early tomorrow and the aire we are currently using is filling up for the weekend, so no doubt our space will soon be filled tomorrow.
We’ve checked up on the otters and all three were out enjoying the last rays of the sun before it moved off the riverbank tonight. I had a horrible feeling that they might be rats after all this, but Peter assures me they aren’t – must look it up when I get back, not sure if he’s just humouring me….
We intend to spend some time in La Rochelle tomorrow on the way to Ile d’Oleron and from there continue down the west coast. It looks as if we are following Peter’s “European coastline anti-clockwise” idea even though we did not plan to stick to it religiously, but once we reach Biarritz we will head inland and north, making our way up to the Loire to explore a few chateaux and meet up with Lynn and Irvin.

24/09/09

Day 16 – September 24
The day dawned bright and sunny again, and as this weather is only forecast to last until the weekend and our sunburn has subsided, we packed our towels and sun cream and headed for the beach, to be beach bums for the day. Unfortunately this involved re-kindling my love-hate affair with my bicycle, which you may or may not know is my most hated form of transport. I could never ride a bike well as a child, and nothing has happened to alter that unhappy state of affairs in the intervening forty-odd years. Needless to say, Peter finds this absolutely hilarious and his sadistic streak comes to the fore as he pedals off into the distance, leaving me trailing in his wake pedalling like fury and complaining about what the saddle is doing to my posterior! To add insult to injury, he made me do it again this evening because he fancied a beer in a bar!
The season is still going in La Tranche and the shops and bars are still open, unlike many of the places we have visited en route to here. It was lovely to wander round the town remembering places from twenty years ago – this is where I first learned how big a tuna fish is from seeing one on a cutting slab in the poissonerie, next to a huge saw!
The aire is very busy tonight. Our immediate neighbour is a man on his own who has a cage of canaries for company which have been outside today, enjoying the sun! But the clientele is mainly French motorhomes whose occupants appear to be much older than we are which makes us realise, not for the first time, just how lucky we are to be able to do this at this time in our lives, while we are fit and able – and can still ride a bike!

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….

22/09/09

Day 14 – September 22
We woke this morning to brilliant sunshine – hurray! – so the decision was made for us to stay at least another night at La Baule.
We walked to the beach from the site, which took us about half an hour, but we have to do some exercise to try to burn off the daily pain chocolat and delicious French bread!
There was hardly anyone around when we arrived at the beach but as it curves around a huge bay there could have been hundreds further along for all we knew! We braved it out and were eventually joined by a few other sun-worshippers and we couldn’t help thinking how different this must have been a few weeks ago when the French were on holiday and probably jostling for space in exactly the same spot. We watched a group of schoolchildren being taken out for sailing lessons in catamarans and as far as we could tell there was only one instructor to twenty eight – can you imagine the Health & Safety reaction to that in the UK?? But what a fantastic activity to be included in your curriculum.
We haven’t had any problems with the language over here so far, the accent has been easy to understand and they seem to be able to understand us when we have spoken to anyone – which hasn’t been that often! We have to confess to not being very sociable beyond the obligatory “Bonjour” – most of the motorhomers we have neighboured with have been French or German and occasionally Dutch, with very few English, probably due to the abominable current exchange rate. France is no longer a cheap holiday option.
We have been away two weeks tomorrow. It seems like a lot longer, and I guess from here on in it is no longer a fortnight’s holiday and more the lifestyle change we have been so looking forward to. There are obviously things we miss about home, not least our very understanding children, but so far we have absolutely no regrets – and we are still speaking!

21/09/09

Day 13 – September 21
Peter will be glad to see the back of Brittany! The direction signs translated into Breton are enough of a problem on their own, but the Bretons also seem to be on a mission to see how many towns they can name with the prefix “Plou…” – there are hundreds, and it’s very confusing when you are trying to identify where you are from a map!
The weather this morning had changed back again and the cloud was so thick and low it seemed like fog. Being so close to the sea we thought it could be a sea fret, but by 10.00am it was showing no signs of lifting so we decided to move on. We were initially going to stay on a site at Carnac just a few kilometres along the coast, but it was still grey when we reached there so we pressed on.
We stopped off in Carnac to buy our now essential pain chocolat and croissants for breakfast and stopped by a beach to eat them with hot strong coffee – lovely!
As we were in the vicinity of Locmariaquer we made a slight detour to visit the megaliths here which date to 5000BC, mainly because we thought we should! The structures are truly impressive, a range of burial mounds and standing stones and like our own Stonehenge the mystery lies in how and why?
Whilst we were there we met an English couple who we had encountered earlier at our breakfast stop. They also have a Hymer, which is always a conversation starter! It turned out that they have been over here for six months running a Keycamp site in northern Brittany and having just finished are now treating themselves to a holiday before returning to the UK. It was very interesting talking to them and certainly gave us food for thought for the future.
Our onward journey took us through St Trinite sur Mer, a very fashionable resort with the sailing fraternity, with so many yachts in the marina Peter likened their masts to a forest!
Having finally decided to head further south we find ourselves on a site at La Baule. This afternoon has been hot and sunny, so if this continues we may stay another night and enjoy a day on the beach tomorrow. Whatever we decide, being on a site gives you chance to do a few chores, get the washing done (madly exciting!) and generally sit out and relax a little more than is possible on an aire.
We particularly enjoyed Brittany for its fantastic rugged coastline, as you will have gathered from our previous posts, but we need more sun!
I realise that a lot of our posts must sound very similar now – I hope you aren’t bored by them – apologies if you are!