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.

Saying goodbye to the Queens country

We finally set off today, about 3 weeks late! After months of planning it all felt a bit surreal to actually be in Gertie (that’s our van) and hitting the open road. Jacques was certainly better at saying goodbye than me, I was in floods of tears as we pulled out of Mum & Dad’s driveway and didn’t stop crying until our first stop in Southbourne.

We had decided to stop a few times on our way to Portsmouth to visit friends and family. First stop was Southbourne to see Al and Kate and their adorable new baby Skye Rose who slept throughout our fleeting visit, in spite of Jacques’ ear splitting decibels! Next stop was Southampton to see Jacques’ grandparents, Blanche and Eric, who very kindly filled us up with tea and biscuits knowing that it would our last good feed for a few months!

We got to Portsmouth at about 8pm and the ferry wasn’t due to leave until 11pm so we decided to christen Gertie (not what you’re thinking!) and cook our dinner in the queue for the ferry. This was it- proper travellers! We cracked open one of the cans of food kindly supplied by my Mum & Dad and celebrated the beginning of our trip with some lovely Lidl macaroni cheese- yum! Corny as it sounds we love cooking and eating in Gertie, it feels like such a big adventure, even when you’re sat in Portsmouth with other people gawping through your windows waiting for a ferry on a rainy Sunday night.

Much to our surprise the bargain ferry we had booked turned out to be really nice and the sleeper seats were just like those pictures of the beds for first class travellers on Virgin Atlantic flights- they were so comfortable- the only problem being that Jacques and I had omitted to actually bring any pillows or blankets out of the van. We had to make do with lying on the sticky faux leather upholstery of the sleeper seats, positioning them at a slight upright angle to make us feel like we had pillows and shivering away with nothing to cover us whilst our fellow (smug) travellers were snuggling under their duvets.

To make matters worse at about 4am when everyone must have simultaneously reached a lovely deep level of sleep there was a crescendo of snoring, spluttering and groaning. Seriously, I am not exaggerating it sounded like we were surrounded by snuffling, truffling pigs and it was getting louder by the second.

I grumpily started to grind my teeth in anger and glared at each offending truffeler,s whilst they blissfully continued to snort smiling in their sleeping contentedness, which made me even angrier. Jacques sensibly left me to the teeth

grinding and went to get a coffee.

Getting ready to leave!

So here we are tying up all the loose ends at home and getting ready to leave for France on Sunday, Kate's got a route planned out but I think we're pretty much making a bline straight for Hossegor to soak up some rays and enjoy some waves. Still so much to do and so little time to do it in, for one getting this blog sorted! - Another thing to tick off a very long list!

So here it is our blog, what are we going to write about? Basically all about our travels in Gurtie, our home on wheels, whilst we travel around for however long it is....