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.....
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