Sartorially Speaking

This post is dedicated to my sister Hannah, who finds my current clothing situation particularly laughable, and delights in telling me what gorgeous, fashionable things she is wearing every day. In the summer months dressing for camper van chic was never really a challenge: sling on a bikini and a pretty summer dress, flip flops and maybe something a bit flamboyant like a head scarf- et voila! Perfect summer laid-back dressing. The summer wardrobe was never really a source of embarrassment- everyone in the surfing towns we’ve been visiting dresses like this, there’s no attention to the season’s trends or a divide between the fashionable people and the non-fashionistas, everyone looks the same. Some people might find this a bit depressing, but for me- a person who has never quite had her finger on the pulse of fashion- it was a relief. After living in Bournemouth where there seemed to be a veritable army of plastics wandering around with their long, fake-tanned limbs, swishing their highlights around and channelling every new trend to hit the shops- and where I inevitably felt like a frumpy, fashionably backward, pale comparison- summer dressing on the continent has been stress-free. In fact, in Portugal I felt like a fashion goddess. I don’t want to tarnish the whole country with the same brush, so please remember that I am only talking about Figueira da Foz where we spent most of our time, but my god- those ladies had some strange ideas about what to wear! Rhine-stone encrusted, stonewashed tight dungaree dresses, backless, frontless, crutch-hugging, sequined, neon-coloured monstrosities were everywhere. I felt like I’d been transported to Dollywood, and this was fine by me who sat smugly by channelling my own hippy chic look and feeling a bit fashionably superior for once.

So summer dressing was a breeze, oh how I loved it, oh how I wish I could be transported back to those heady days. Because now I am living in fashion hell. The French women, who quite frankly seemed to let their high-gloss, high-maintenance standards slips for the balmy summer days have embraced the new chill in the air with gusto. Out come the knee high, buttery soft leather boots with beautiful fitting jeans and crisp white shirts, silk scarves artfully knotted at the neck, or around the hips, long, tailored lambswool coats- I could go on, but I am sure that you get my point. There’s no doubt about it, these ladies know how to dress.... and I don’t! Well, that’s not strictly true- I am in fact impaired by the lack of winter clothes that we packed to bring away with us. You might recall that our initial plan was to return to the UK in October to swap our summer clothes for our winter ones. This was because we were planning to head up to the Alps for the winter, and therefore we would need our salopettes and ski booties and jumpers that we didn’t have room for in Gertie over the summer months. Sadly we didn’t go back to the UK in October. I say sadly because now I find myself wearing the scant few winter clothes that I did pack (for the occasional chilly summer evenings) every single day. We changed our plans because we decided that our savings would last longer of we stayed in Hossegor for the winter and concentrated on making websites, and it’s a sound plan; but I would like to go back to the day that I agreed to it and have a word in my ear: ‘what exactly are you going to wear for the next 5 months Kate?’

I don’t consider myself to be a vain person, and I am not usually preoccupied with what to wear, but I realise that is because I usually have clothes suitable for every occasion, so it’s not something I need to think about. Winter 2006, for example, I was channelling Red Riding Hood with my lovely red winter coat and fluffy boots. Clothes weren’t something that I ever spent a lot of time thinking about, but now I find myself pining for that coat and those boots, and the rest of my winter wardrobe for that matter because my current winter collection consists of: one pair of black jeans, a green jumper, a red jumper, a black jumper and a brown hoodie. Full stop. Yes, every day when I get dressed I am faced with the difficult decision between.... 4 jumpers! I don’t even have a coat here, and if I decided to mix it up and not wear my jeans I would have nothing to wear to cover my bottom half- and I wouldn’t inflict that on the gentile people of France! And don’t even get me started on footwear. Oh alright then, if you insist, I am currently living in the only shoes that I have brought with me that aren’t flip flops or open-toed wedges and that is: trainers! Every single day I wear trainers, no matter what the situation, if we’re going out to a bar or a restaurant they’d better not have a no-trainer policy, because if they do then I am not getting in! I have seriously considered cracking out the flip flops again, just for some variation on the trainer theme, but the morning frost kind of puts me off. So trainers it is then.

And it’s only now that I begin to realise that although I might not think I’m vain, and I might never have spent hours agonising about what to wear, the clothes that you wear do really affect your mood. If it’s the same thing every single day, no variations, you begin to feel a bit... well, dull really. I never thought about how much that red coat affected me, but I now see that it put a spring in my step and brought a splash of colour to the otherwise grey winter days; I never knew that a choice between two pairs of shoes could make me smile- but it does and I will never take that choice for granted again. I might not have the most fashionable wardrobe in the world waiting for me back in my parent’s loft (in fact it’s all at least a season old, so it definitely isn’t fashionable) but I am salivating at the thought of being able to wear it all again. Roll on Christmas I say, the first thing I am going to do when I get home is get that loft ladder out! (n.b. I would like to assure my friends and family that of course I am looking forward to seeing them too, the excitement is not just about the red coat- honest!)

Spain, Portugal, Drag Queens & Ants

I need to say a big apology to all (and I am sure there are lots of you!) avid followers of the blog for not posting anything new for quite a while now. If you were following our travels reading the blog, you would be forgiven for thinking that we have spent all of our time in France on the beach, when in fact we have crossed Spain, spent 5 weeks in Portugal, come back to France and the weather is certainly not beach-friendly any more!

I blame the lack of updates on the fact that van life is like a black hole where time is no longer measured in the same way as it is in ‘real’ life. Whereas a day in the real world would be choc- full of activity: showering, going to work, coming home form work, cooking dinner, socialising with friends etc. Van life does not involve as much activity and yet all activities take up proportionately more time. So, for example, a shower in real time takes 10-15minutes; a shower in van time (as previously described in the Blog) takes infinitely longer, it involves planning and is logistically very difficult! Therefore, one shower can take up a whole day. Working with this equation of one activity= one day; you achieve a lot less in a week here and therefore it doesn’t feel like a week has passed. In fact, you can probably work on the premise that one day in the real world equals a week’s worth of activity in the van world. So, by my calculations it’s only been a couple of weeks since I last blogged!

As we’ve established though, a lot of real time has passed since I last blogged, so I’ve decided not to bore you (or tire my poor digits) by writing lengthy descriptions about everything that we have been up to. Instead the plan is to write a quick re-cap of our travels in chronological order elaborating on the highlights (Jacques wearing a dress and make-up in public, for example- more on this later!)

After finding that it was near impossible to find anywhere cost-effective to use the internet in Hossegor (you might not be aware that we are working on this trip and therefore, need the internet to be able to work- if anyone needs a new website please contact Jacques!!) Jacques had a brainwave and we decided to go to Portugal. It sounds pretty far-fetched to conceive that travelling the whole way across the middle of Spain to the West Coast of Portugal would be cheaper than biting the bullet and spending €7 an hour to use the internet at the cafe here in Hossegor, but we did the maths and Portugal was the cheaper option! Jacques had spent his stag do at a place called Figueira da Foz on Portugal’s west coast between Lisbon and Porto, and he contacted the owners of the hostel where he stayed for that weekend (Ben & Kerry @ the Paintshop Hostel) to see if they would mind us rocking up in the van and parking outside for a week or so, oh and using their internet at the same time (and their hot showers for that matter!). Ben & Kerry, being the lovely people they are, decided that we wouldn’t lower the tone of their neighbourhood too much and invited us over. Plans in place, we set off for Fig da Foz from Hossegor at about 11am.....and drove non-stop to arrive there by 11pm the same day. 12 hours of solid driving at Gertie’s speeds (which are not exactly lightening fast) is never enjoyable. There’s only so much conversation that Jacques and I can sustain on a long journey-and that usually runs out within the hour- so we were both lost to our own worlds, me flinching as big trucks whizzed past us at hundreds of kilometres and hour and Jacques resolutely ignoring my flinching. Add to this the fact that the temperature in Spain on the day that we chose to make our journey was 38 degrees and you will understand that this was not a pleasant road trip. Jacques was sweating so heavily I actually mistook the beads of sweat for tears at one point and demanded to know what on earth was wrong. When we stopped for a toilet break my shoes stuck to the melting tarmac in the car park. It was hellish. When we arrived we literally had to peel ourselves off Gertie’s seats, leaving behind perfect sweat stains of our bottoms, which are still there now- I wonder if that will affect Gertie’s re-sale value?!

However horrendous the trip was, it was definitely worth it. Ben and Kerry have such a nice place: clean, airy, shaded during the day, a bar and hot showers!!! We parked Gertie outside and didn’t leave for 5 weeks! We were there for work, and it’s fair to say that during the day we did work, but the nights were a different story! Portugal seemed a world apart from France, and no more so than when it came to the price of enjoying yourself! In France you’ll pay €5 for a beer in a bar, in Portugal you pay €0.80- really. Wine is the same bargainous price as beer so Jacques and I were very happy bunnies and determined to make the most of our relative wealth whilst we were there by running up extravagant looking bar tabs (100 beers in 3 weeks Jacques?) and then breathing a sigh of relief as the total price was added up, and it came to considerably less than it would anywhere else in Europe! The Paintshop was good for more than beer though, Ben & Kerry have a very cute son called Fin who is one year old and will certainly be a heartbreaker when he is grown up! I spent many an hour (whilst working of course, I am a woman I can multi-task) pulling silly faces in Fin’s direction and waving my arms around liked a crazed woman, in order to get a smile out of him. I think my antics resulted in a smile one time out of five, but it was worth it- he’s so, so cute! Kerry has also become a very good friend. I was seriously lamenting the lack of oestrogen-fuelled conversations (Jacques tries, but he’s not a female and therefore doesn’t want to discuss the demise of Britney Spears for hours on end) so meeting Kerry was fantastic for me. We bonded over a mutual ability to match each other glass for glass of wine (white or red, we’re not picky) and I left the Paintshop having made a friend for life.

A few highlights of our stay were: the beach (the widest in Europe); being able to afford to eat out (as many prawns as you can eat for €15); pizza night; salsa night; all of the hostel guests that we met during our stay- the list is endless and I could go on for pages, but I won’t bore you all. Instead I’ll just mention one episode that definitely merits a write up, if only for the fact that I can embarrass my lovely husband! Jacques birthday fell during our stay at the Paintshop, and we chose to mark it in true Portuguese style by drinking (lots), eating (lots) and humiliating Jacques (lots). Graeme came to stay with us on his way back to Argentina, so there are reliable witnesses to the fact that after a day of drinking, go-karting and a delicious BBQ, Jacques agreed (under no duress) to hit the town of Fig da Foz wearing an orange mini dress, hot pants, an alice band and drag-queen make up! He looked gorgeous (if you like that kind of thing!) Unfortunately we couldn’t find any stilettos in a size 11, so the look wasn’t quite as polished as we would have liked (Jacques had to wear his big Vans trainers) but believe me, he still turned some heads! After hitting a few bars, Ben decided to lead Jacques into a gay bar, where the bouncer took rather a shine to my husband!! This man was built like a human tank, if anyone remembers the TV show Gladiators, he looked like Rhino and his arms were about twice the size of my waist. Rhino liked Jacques...a lot.... and came to find me to strike up a deal. If he had offered me money or something of value, I might have agreed to let him take Jacques home as he was asking, but fortunately for Jacques, Rhino had nothing to offer in the way of financial incentives! He challenged me to an arm wrestle for my man, but I was sober enough to realise that those arms would probably mean his victory and politely declined whilst whisking Jacques away to safety far away from Rhino’s amorous gazes!

We could have stayed at the Paintshop for much longer. Portugal is a lovely place- not as polished as France- but so friendly and friendly on the bank balance too. It was a real wrench to say goodbye to Ben, Kerry and Fin, but after 5 weeks we knew we had to start making our way back to France as my parents were coming over to Hossegor for a visit, and I couldn’t wait to see them. We’ll definitely be making a trip back to the Paintshop before our ‘honeymoon’ is over, and I am already looking forward to it.

We decided not to try to make the journey from Fig da Foz back to Hossegor all in one day, and instead chose to stop off at some quiet-looking beaches along Portugal’s coast, whilst making our way slowly North, and breaking the journey up a bit. At one such beach, Praia de Santa Pedro de Maceda (quite a mouthful!) we encountered what has probably been our most dangerous foe of the whole trip so far. ANTS. This beach was the definition of quiet. There was one other van camped there on the first night that we stayed, the sky was jet black, no ambient light, just stars and silence. It was blissful and Jacques and I decided to stay one extra night before making our way back through Portugal and Spain. The ‘incident’ happened on our second night. We went to bed early as there was nothing else to do: no power, no bars to visit, not even any other vans on this evening, nothing except us and the night sky. Unfortunately we didn’t realise that we weren’t quite as alone as we thought. We dropped off to sleep for a few hours but after a while I started to feel as if something, or more specifically some things, we crawling all over my face and arms. I kept brushing them off, and put it down to my subconscious playing tricks on me. Finally, after about an hour of this, I noticed that Jacques was stirring in his sleep too, this quickly escalated to fidgeting, then maniacal shuddering, and then finally he leapt up and turned the light on. What we saw was like something out of a horror film the bed, our arms, Jacques face, my face, the walls, every surface in the van were TEEMING with ants. I promise that I am not exaggerating, they were everywhere- it was quite a wake up call! Jacques was screaming and flapping his arms around, he leapt out of the van stark naked (thank goodness there weren’t any other vans around!) and jumped into the driver’s seat and drove us down the road away from all trees and wood (which was where we thought the ants must have come from). It was 3am, we had a whole day of driving ahead of us, and we spent the next 3 hours solidly fighting back against the invasion. We started out using shoes to clobber the ants, but quickly moved onto our bare hands- not very Buddhist I know, but this was war! Every time we thought we had killed all of the buggers more would emerge, marching out from behind a cupboard, or up out of the engine. It was so surreal, and extremely stressful. We had to take every single thing out of the van, including the seat covers, and the seats themselves in the end. The situation was compounded by the fact that it was pitch dark outside, very early in the morning and there didn’t seem to be an end to it as more and more ants emerged. At about 6am, we decided that we were beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and we were winning the battle, so we piled everything back into the van and drove to the nearest town to wait for a supermarket to open where we could buy the strongest, industrial-sized ant killer available. Once we had purchased a spray covered in harzard warnings and pictures of skull and crossbones (it seemed like the most lethal) we undertook the first of many fumigations. It wasn’t very environmentally friendly, or good for our health (as every time we sprayed the stuff we could hardly breathe) but we got that spray into every nook and cranny and then shut the windows and doors (with us outside) and waited for the poison to do it’s worst. When we thought we’d left it for long enough we opened the doors to find an ants graveyard- there were dead ants everywhere- it was really quite satisfying given what we had gone through! So, our journey unfolded. We stopped every couple of hours or so for more fumigation and as the day passed and turned into night, I was armed with a torch and my fist and my job was to shine the light onto Jacques’ legs whilst he drove so that I could check for ants and kill any that dared to show their faces. There were a few hairy moments when Jacques was convinced an ant was crawling on him, and he would ‘forget’ that he was driving in control of a 3 tonne vehicle down a motorway and start screaming and swerving everywhere, but we made it back to Hossegor just about in one piece. Since then we’ve been on permanent ant- watch, and even though many weeks have passed I still have nightmares about waking up and finding them crawling all over my face, in my ears, on the duvet.....

French Phenomenon

French women are perfect- fact. Tanned and thin- even women with tiny babies that can’t be more than a week old have flat stomachs. Yet France is the country of food lovers, everywhere you go there are gastronomic delights. Once I overheard two couples arguing over the best bakery to buy their baguettes from, and they weren’t arguing about the price. No, they were discussing which boulangerie made the best quality baguettes (at least I am pretty sure that’s what they were talking about without the benefit of subtitles in real life situations).

Every day Jacques and I see French families arriving at the beach laden down with cool boxes, picnic baskets and paper bags filled with baguettes. In the morning at the bakery you can witness French women buying six loaves at a time on the bread run- such copious amounts of food, and yet still so svelte.

Utilising my newly found discreet skill of people-watching (facilitated by the huge black sunglasses the Jacques brought me from the market in Le Penon) I now spend approximately four to six hours a day happily engrosses in watching other people go about their lives. After all there’s only so much conversation that Jacques and I can fill the day with, given the fact that we’ve been together for nearly ten years now! Anyway, I digress, through the course of watching these slim French beauties I have discovered their secret. I have unlocked the key to the so-called ‘French Paradox’ when it comes to maintaining a stunning figure whilst simultaneously appearing to eat and drink as much bread, cheese and red wine as you want. The truth is that French women (and I don’t claim to be able to speak for all of them, only those that I have whiled away the hours observing) don’t eat....except for fruit.

It’s true! Now, I can’t tell you what a typical French woman will eat for breakfast or dinner in their own homes (Jacques wouldn’t let me follow a family home, apparently that escalates the harmless pass time of people watching to stalking and is generally frowned upon) but I can tell you that they don’t eat lunch on the beach. Those cool boxes filled with lovingly prepared homemade vegetable tartlets, baguettes oozing with delicious cheeses & meats, whole roast chickens and stunning gateaux that the French mothers dole out to their husbands, fathers, children, nieces and nephews never, ever pass their own lips.

There is a certain theatre involved in the whole process: the mother is the head of the show and each dish is revealed from the cool bag or picnic basket with much razzle and dazzle. The tin foil is peeled back to expose another exquisite culinary delight and every family member is served, everyone must have a bit. However the mother, as the server, omits her own plate and only when everyone else’s plates are heaving does she dig into the bottom of the hamper and produce a lone apple or nectarine, and this is all that she will eat.

So, how do French women maintain such envious figures? It’s simple; replace lunch with fruit and fatten up everyone else around you so that you look even more gorgeous on the beach- voila! A French figure envied by all.

Camping etiquette and cleanliness

We’ve spent the last week in Hossegor/Seignosse experiencing our first proper slice of van life, which basically means very little washing, and lots of time on the beach. Hossegor is a town that has embraced the surf lifestyle so fully, you wonder what it would be without the surfing industry to sustain it. Every other shop sells surf clothes or hardware and if you’re not walking down the street with a surfboard under your arm you are the odd one out. It’s a surfer’s paradise and it is definitely getting rich off the industry. Everything is more expensive than last time we came here, including the aire de campings where you can park your van for the night, and the shops, bars and restaurants. Its an amazing place to be- so vibrant and full of life, but when your budget is €20 a day, it is difficult to do anything here other than park up, pay for the privilege, eat rice and beans (Jacques and I have eaten this meal and variations of it so often that the smell of it has permeated the van and we spend hours discussing whether the smell has got stronger, or whether it has dissipated a bit!) and drink cheap wine from the supermarket. We’re having a great time, but its so frustrating when you’re walking down the street with the smell of crepes and croissants and moules and frites wafting at you from every direction, and you know that you’ve got rice and beans for dinner.........AGAIN!!! Despite the rice, we have loved our week in Hossegor.

We split our time between two aire de campings- one in Seignosse and one in Capbreton. The places are just big areas (Seignosse in the woods and Capbreton in a car park next to the beach) where motorhomes can park up for the night, and use the toilets, fill up with water and hook up to 240v. They’re really popular and often close to full, so the good spaces are at a bit of a premium. Jacques will deny this, but he’s developed an obsession about getting the good spots, and if anyone else has parked in them when we’ve been out for the day, he gets extremely angry! In fact, in Seignosse, when our prime space furthest from the road had been taken by a Spanish van Jacques decided to overcome this small obstacle by haring towards the van with Michael Jackson blaring from the speakers and wheel spinning into the smallest space in the world directly behind their van, next to the fence. Great- we had ‘our’ space, not so great we were so close to the Spanish van that I could hear everything, even when they farted in their sleep and they didn’t even start cooking their dinner until 11pm, so I was kept awake all night, whilst Jacques slept next to me oblivious to the noise and smug that we hadn’t been usurped by another van.

Small things like your van space become so important when you’re on the road, probably because we don’t have jobs to think about. If you’re relaxing for the evening under the awning (another of Jacques’ obsessions, but we won’t go into that) and another van comes into the aire de camping everyone, and I mean everyone, stops what they’re doing and stares at the new van. I promise that I am not exaggerating- even the small children haring around and around the camping areas on their bikes brake hard and stare. You see all nationalities do this; it’s not just an English thing. Everyone stares and stares until the driver of the van has done a lap and decided where to park and people only stop staring once the van has been manoeuvred into the chosen space, and the engine turned off. The people who the new van has parked closest to are the losers, because they’ve lost a bit of their space, their little empire has been reduced, and everyone else breathes a sigh of relief because their space hasn’t been encroached. Its’ strange, and I try to stop myself doing it but whenever I hear the familiar rumble of a van my territorial receptors prick up and I have to join in the staring.

I won’t lie, washing has been a problem this week. Oh, for the heady days in Ile D’Oleron when the aire de camping had showers.....These aire de campings in Hossegor don’t have showers, the one in Capbreton doesn’t even have a toilet. And the toilets, it is making me cringe to write about them, they are singularly disgusting. They are little capsules, which automatically ‘clean’ themselves once the person leaves. I use the word clean in the loosest sense- what they actually do is spray foul smelling disinfectant all over the floor and then the toilet fills up with water and everything floats out of it, all over the floor and swills around for a bit, getting the toilet paper sopping wet, the bin wet, the toilet seat wet, and then all of the water is sucked out through a drain. I know this because I stupidly went into the toilet after someone left- they kindly held the door open for me and I walked straight in without thinking. Oh, but I did think when the lights wouldn’t come on, the automatic lock came on and the disinfectant started spraying all over the floor and my feet, and my ankles and then the toilet overflowed with the kind person’s excrement floating out, past my shins whilst I beat the door with my fists like a hysterical mad woman. Not nice. The horrors I have seen in these toilets (if you’re squeamish, don’t read the next sentence): A used nappy with a cigarette stubbed out in the poo; used tampons stuck to the floor because of the ingenious self-cleaning mechanism, hairballs- I can’t go on, you get the picture.

So, as you can imagine, nobody wants to have a wash in the toilets- it would be a physical impossibility to come out of them cleaner. This has left us with the dilemma of what to do about washing. We do have a shower in the van, but one use would take all of the water that we can put in our tank and it takes us a long, painful time to fill the tank up because we are too stingy to buy a hose and have to use a laborious bucket and bottle method that we’ve made up. So, without the option of our own shower, we have turned to the fresh water showers at the beach for cleanliness. The problem i that they drain off down the beach and you don’t really want to be using shower gel or shampoo, or anything that foams in them because it becomes obvious to everyone that some skank is having a proper shower and you’re only supposed to use them for rinsing off sea water. Also, the showers are cold, freezing, teeth-chatteringly cold, so going after dark when the air temp is pretty low too, isn’t really an option. Instead we’ve taken to stealth showering when no one is looking and creating diversionary tactics like pointing out to sea with animated looks on our faces in the hope that anyone around will look to see what we’re making such a fuss about, and then we can whip out the shower gel from Jacques’ shorts and frantically wash our arm pits without being detected.

Hossegor- we made it- FINALLY

So, here we are- its Monday and we have made it to Hossegor our first planned destination. Its raining today (don't feel sorry for us, its been gorgeous up until now, and forecasted to be sunny again tomorrow). Anyway, we're using the grey day to catch up on some blogging and emails in a cafe next to the sea, so Jacques can run if any waves appear!

So, just to recap, on what we've done since the last post:

Weds 18/07/07
We decided that it would be rude not to spend a day at the beach in Oleron, given the fact that the sun was blazing and the sea was 20 degrees- bliss. We spent the day lying prostrate on our towels punctuated by frequent (at Jacques' insistence) games of gay ball, which I am pleased to report I am getting much better at (we can now achieve a rally of 4 hits without me missing the ball!). The day was long, the sun shone, the sea was warm- it was paradise, until Jacques pointed out that I was looking a little bit pink. Now, I know about the dangers of the sun, and how important it is to reapply cream but in my haste to get the the beach I seemed to have missed large patches of skin, which were no looking a rather luminous shade of fuchsia. I wasn't the only guilty party- Jacques was also sporting a lovely bright red line across his shoulders, which had already started to peel. Not good. In our defence, I think the lack of sun in England made us forget the basics of sun safety. Lesson learned- we've now invested in factor 30 and it won't happen again! Suffice to say, we spent the evening in Gertie trying to keep as far apart from eachother as possible (not easy in a small van believe me) in order to avoid the waves of heat emanating from eachother's burnt bits and we made VERY good friends with the aftersun.

Thursday 19/07/07

More travelling- great! Now, don't get me wrong the idea of a road trip is fab: the wind in your hair, the open road ahead of you, the scenery, the beautiful places you would never see otherwise.... The reality is two sunburnt grumpy people sitting in a van where the fans have broken bickering about directions and being freaked out every ten minutes or so by crazy French drivers haring at you at a rate of knots with no regard for that fact that the road is very narrow and you are in a very wide vehicle with cars on one side and traffic on the other- it is a good way to raise your heartbeat to say the least. I have now bitten off all of my nails and have taken to covering my face with my hands whenever I see a car coming towards us, which Jacques has pointed out isn't very helpful, but it makes me feel better.

We had a plan to take the Royan ferry to cut out about 100k of the road journey to the South West coast roads and then stop at Sulac sur Mer on the other side for some more beach action, and hopefully some waves. Well, we made the ferry and had a seamless crossing. But Sulac sur Mer wasn't to be: nowhere for camper vans to park overnight.

So we consulted our handy French campingcar book to find the next place along the coast with an area for camping and headed for Carcans. Now, I have a bone to pick with the publishers of this 'handy' little book-
the directions in it are obscure to say the least, the vital information about the fact that you have to contact the police in the town if you want the camping area to be opened up was omitted, and 2/3 times the places published in the book don't exist! We have been on a magical mystery tour around many towns now in search of mythical camping areas that really aren't there (believe me we have looked hard for them) at the hands of the book. The book has now been relegated to the back of the van and we're relying on sign posts and intuition, which has proved to be much more effective!

Using this combination we found ourselves in Lacanau, a surfer's party town, which we couldn't party in given our very small funds, but the atmosphere was brilliant. One thing that did freak us out thouhg, was a large procession through the town centre by a travelling circus parading a lion in a caged van. It was horrible to see, having been brought up in the UK where you just don't see these things because we're told that its cruel to the animals. I don't know if the lion was distressed or not, but we felt uncomfortable looking at it, and decided to get back to the van for some relaxing under the awning, wine drinking and baguette eating-much more civilised. One thing we've noticed about ALL of the towns we've driven though is that every single one has a travelling circus, whihc is advertised on every single lampost with a garish red or yellow flag depicting one of the most creepy and disturbing clowns that I have ever seen- I mean a really freaky clown with a huge, maniacal grin and melting eye make up: the kind of thing that would give children nightmares. I can't believe that anyone would ever want to go to the circus having seen one of these posters, especillay not a small child. Obviously IT was never released here in France.

Friday 20/07/07
A lovely chilled out day updating the blog and going for a bike ride. Not much to report, just one of those great days where the sun is shining and your sunburn has gone down enough to take the leggings off and get your legs out for a bit more tanning!

Saturday 21/07/07

More travelling! This time, we were set on making it to our destination: Hossegor. We thought that we would break up the long journey with a visit to Europe's largest sand dune Dune de Pyla. I'm so glad that we did. The dune was breathtaking (literally, it's 100m vertical climb up soft sand) and the view from the top was definitely worth the punishment on the thighs. The best bit, thoug, was running down the other side! I was so scared, the view from the top was about as steep as a black run, but small children were brave enough to fling themselves over it- so I couldn't really wimp out! Jacques, in his inimitable style, had decided it would be a good idea to bring his skimboard to the top of the dune (despite me warning him that it would make the climb a lot more arduous). So everyone was staring at the crazy English couple with the skimbboard, wondering what Jacques was planning to do with it. All eyes on him, he threw the borad down the slope, jumped on it....and promptly fell off it, because the sand was too soft and wouldn't hold the board and Jacques without it sinking! Fortunately Jacques never worries about looking like a plonker, so he wasn't bothered! Anyway, i did the running off the edge thing, after watching a father doing it with a small baby in his arms (I kid you not!) and it wasn't half as scary as it had looked from the top. It was all quite exhilarating actually, and set us both up for the other half of the the long drive down to Hossegor.

We arrived, weary but happy to see our favourite place (Hossegor) again at about 7pm. Checked into a nice little wooded camping spot in Seignosse and hunkered down under the awning for the night with vin rouge, dinner and the occasional disturbance of huge pine cones crashing down from the trees overhead onto our van throughout the night (but fortunately none on our heads, which I was surprised about given how things like that always seem to happen to us!)

Sunday 22/07/07

Beach, sun, surf and factor 30 all the way: no burnt bits today!

Day one of relaxation!

We woke up to blazing sunshine and had our breakfast outside, whilst we planned our day. For me, this was the real start of the holiday- it felt so relaxing to be sipping coffee in the sunshine outside Gertie and all of the tensions of the day before vanished.

We decided to explore St Denis and its beaches on our bikes. One thing that I have noticed about France on this trip is how ameable everywhere is to cyclists. At every stop so far there have been cycle paths, which cut through the woodland and surrounding areas, away from the road. I’ve never seen so many cyclists in my life, and Jacques and I are both in agreement (after seeing one too many) that men over the age of 50 should never, ever, under any circumstances wear lycra cycling shorts.

The beaches around St Denis are not what you would call beautiful. They are covered with rocks and seaweed all the way down to the sea- not sunbathing beaches at all. I was in my element because I absolutely love rock pools and I persuaded Jacques to get his feet slimy and come rock pooling with me. It was pretty precarious, but we saw some crabs and fish, so it was worth it. We were also struck by how many other people seemed to be into digging around in the rock pools then we realised that they were actually all out collecting shellfish for their dinners. Whole families were out, with things that looked like garden rakes scraping up the rock and collecting things for dinner. I love seafood and was desperate to try collecting some juicy morsels too, but Jacques pointed out that we didn’t have wellingtons, a rake or a bucket so we couldn’t do it. He did promise that we would come back again tomorrow better prepared and give it a go. We had a look in a bucket that a family was loading into their car and saw that they had gathered a collection of mussels and things that looked like snails (that I later saw in the supermarket were called peches).

In the afternoon we drove to a beach further down the island called La Bree and settled down for some sunbathing and relaxing. Oh sorry, did I say sunbathing and relaxing, I forgot that I was with my husband and therefore had to entertain him constantly. There would be no book reading, no quiet contemplation of life or people watching- with Jacques everything has to be ACTION. So, with a heavy heart I agreed to play bat and ball (christened by James and Annie as gay ball, so we call it that). To my surprise, I loved it! I’m not that bad (by that bad, I mean I can hit the ball 1 time out of 3!) and it was good fun, I can almost see where Jacques gets his enthusiasm for being active on the beach from. We cooled off after the game by having a dip- our first swim in the sea this year. It was so gorgeous, really, really warm- I could have stayed there for hours.

Quite an uneventful evening- the routine of camping life takes up most of your time in the evening: putting the awning out, hanging up the wet clothes and towels, cooking dinner, washing up, making the bed, bringing the awning in, packing everything securely away, bringing the washing in... all of these little tasks take hours. Things that are simple in a house (like getting into bed) are a full scale military operation in the van, but its fun and we’re definitely getting better at doing these van things.

The journey to ile d'Oleron

Arrived at Le Havre and the sun was shining- we could tell this was going to be the start of something great. Having suffered through weeks and weeks of rain and dreary grey skies in England, this was the tonic we both needed. We skipped down the stairs of the ferry to find Gertie still in one piece (despite Jacques horror stories about how cars are sometimes found piled on top of each other at the end of ferry crossings). Things were looking up- it was the start of our great adventure. We disembarked, getting pulled over by immigration (we have now been stopped at every possible turn- Jacques thinks its because Gertie is left hand drive with GB number plates, I think its because he refuses to wear a t-shirt when we’re driving and wears his cap backwards...) Fortunately the new Mr & Mrs Woolston passed the passport test with flying colours- James told us that French officials are much more amenable to married couples and its true that as soon as the guard saw we were married his demeanour towards us visibly softened. I knew I got that ring on my finger for something!

The journey out of Le Havre does not need to be repeated- suffice to say there was arguing and shouting between this married couple as we missed the exit for a second time and had driven roughly 60k only to end up exactly where we started. Then the heavens opened- now I am not going to pretend that I laughed and saw the funny side of this. Jacques, bless him, was good natured about it-‘hey its only a bit of rain, we’re on our honeymoon, life is great.’ I disagreed, but didn’t say anything and took to grinding my teeth some more, whilst I thought about the repercussions of garrotting him with one of the many wires coming out of our cigarette lighter (don’t ask!)

The drive was long and arduous - we planned to get to Ile D’Oleron for the night, but it was taking much, much longer than the 5 hours that we anticipated, due to the fact that we had forgotten to take into account the fact that Gertie’s average speed is 70k. To make matters worse, and pretty terrifying there was a huge thunder and lightening storm and the rain was bucketing down. Loads of cars gave up and pulled itno the hard shoulder to wait out the storm, we continued on but at a really slow speed and I was gripping the sides of my seat for dear life. Jacques was pretty blasé about the fact we were driving through a deathtrap and was much more concerned with taking his eyes off the road and looking into the back of the van to see if Gertie was leaking anywhere. This, of course, made me feel even safer on the road and I wished for about the thousandth time that day that I had learnt to drive (the law being that you can’t criticise anyone else’s driving if you can’t drive yourself). We made it through the storm alive, and with our relationship still just about intact and drove on towards Oleron.

Oleron is beautiful, really gorgeous. My mood was already considerably chirpier as we entered Rochefort and suddenly there were miles of blue skies as far as the eye could see, then we took the bridge over to Ile D’Oleron and I seriously couldn’t think of anywhere I would rather be. The only drawback was that it had taken us about 12 hours to get there, so it was fast approaching dark and we weren’t sure where we were going to stay for the night. We had consulted our official Guide to Camping in France, which is all in French (but we think we’ve got it sussed) and there were two areas for camping cars on the island. We found the first one in Boyardville but it was full, so we made our way to the second one praying that it would still have a space for us. We were seriously grubby and exhausted by this point. It had been such a long day, and remember we had only had a few hours sleep on account of the snorers the night before. Fortunately when we pulled into the town St Denis (weird name for a Saint I think, but there you go) we saw sings leading us to a camping area and it was really, really nice. Set in woodlands, with loads of room and privacy for each camper and (joy of joys) a shower block! We both showered and ate and as darkness fell we retired to bed- it had been such a long day and we were just so pleased to finally be stationary and in such a lovely sopt.