France, deuxième partie
Day 40
We get up at 8 and by 9 start gently packing away, remembering the last 3 hour camp pack up! But this time it’s dry so it’s pleasant and leisurely. At one point I’m vacuum packing the beds and I look to the right and a camper van is there with it’s breakfast table out, then I vacuum pack the next bed and turn and they’ve packed up and gone! That’s a speedy adios, unlike us! Stu has a sea swim and we cook eggs, but there is a remarkable lot to do! Once everything is re-stacked and balanced we head back to France. Oo la la as the Spanish waiter said. We depart for Narbonnne and I find a hidden spot where there’s 3km of underground coves for divers. So hidden we can’t find it. We come off a toll road, the map takes us back on the toll road, we come off, and back on once more… but it’s a 3 toll failure!!! That place will remain a secret. So we head to our hotel. An 150 year old mansion. It’s locked and no one answers. I call a number and the person says I will contact my colleague and I wait… !!!! Eventually a lovely lady comes and says, hello, the cleaner did not come and the room is not ready! It’s a big, cool space with a wonderful spiral stone staircase. We say we will go for a walk and traverse through the beautiful yellow rape seed, and grapevines. It’s all terribly French. We return and being amiable about the room has seemingly won us a toilet! We were due to have a shared bathroom but the lady said ‘I think you will prefer your own toilet’ and changed our room. We decide the big old house is the place to write a novel, but seeing as we won’t have time for that we give each other 10 words to write a poem in the ludicrously idyllic courtyard! (The afternoons work can be found in creative corner on the website!!!) Creative time over and we head to a tiny town for some dinner. After, we try and hunt some cheese down but all supermarkets are shut at 8pm. We try the ‘midnight express’, a late night convenient store, but though there are a few biscuits and bonjela on the shelves, it looks like the real business is out the back and the basic essentials on display just a ruse! With dedication to fromage we hunt some of the good stuff down. And back to the mansion to close out peeling baby blue shutters.
Again terribly French, and it is magnifique!
France, deuxième partie
Day 41
Well it’s a split day today. Part calm and serene, part escape room and part luck. We have breakfast at the mansion where I watch a French lady dip her baguette, avec butter and jam into her coffee. I ponder the soggy outcome and don’t follow suit! We have the perfect French Soundscape today. From Amelie the soundtrack to ‘French winding roads’, a playlist that Stu has made. It makes the journey even more whimsical. We make an early stop at Gruissan. A huge natural salty wetlands and lake. Home to thousands of birds and wildlife abound. We drive on and spontaneously pull over on the river Aude. We decide to get the chairs out and make a cup of tea whilst Wilson collects an array of sticks from the water. Feeling envious of Wilson we take it in turns to have a swim. It has a strong current and it’s a great work out. Like when you have a bungy wire in a small pool for resistance. Swimming but just staying in the same spot! Then it’s escape room time. We go to our apartment but first you must drive 10 mins to a key pick up point. You get sent a code to enter the building. You pay a deposit of €450 before you get the next code which opens box O with the key in. You drive 10 mins back to the apartment and must park in the correct spot and try and find the building among many possibilities you could be staying in. No bedding as that is an extra €20’s and about 4 maybe 5 emails telling me I must clean the apartment, mop the floor, dry the mop and the different ways I may incur a fine and lose the deposit!!! It’s not the greatest prize to an escape room but we then have some luck as we discover we have arrived in Cap D’Agne on the last day of ‘Vinocap’ a three day wine festival in the area! So we head down and pay our 5 Euros that gets us a glass in a shoulder bag and 5 tickets to taste 5 different wines. However it’s the last day and the tickets go out the window. Everyone lets you try as many as you want for free in the last attempt to sell some bottles. It works and we buy three! We stop for oysters and langoustine on the way back and ‘Cap De Agde’ is abuzz. A group of men all in red berets are at the tattoo parlour and I’m sure will wake up with no regrets!!
Les Enfants sont grognons!
Day 42
So we are ultimately on the journey to Geneva but it’s a bit far in one go. So we book a place in Rives as our stop off. There’s really one word for today…TRAFFIC. We have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner! Stu spots it early so we go via the coast which means so we walk along the beach, have a drink and Wilson has a lovely old swim. This is it for highlights! The rest is just our buzz word, TRAFFIC. What makes it worse is someone has hacked Waze or it’s glitching and every few hundred metres signs come up with
‘flooded road in 200m’ or ‘bad weather in 350m’ or ‘slippery road… in blah blah blah’ the day is lovely and sunny and none of these things exist but they just keep popping up. At first it was amusing but when 10.5 hours of the day was spent driving the what should have been a 3.5 hour drive, as you can imagine it wore thin! We arrive. Stu cooked us a lovely meal which we ate at 11pm and… traffic, I mean, goodnight!
France, deuxième partie
Day 43
It will turn out to be a mixed bag of a day. Unfortunately I wake up feeling unwell which leads to gingerly packing up, heading to lake Geneva and puking in a petrol station on the way! But then you drive and see the almighty mountains covered in thousands of tenacious trees defying gravity and feel a little better. We arrive at the apartment early as we haven’t stopped off (due to the vomiting) but the landlord says it’s ready and we can go in early. Which is a result as I can have a lay down and we get a much needed wash on, as Stu is down to his last pair of pants. Slightly recharged we head down to the beach and see the impressive lake that is Geneva. I might add we are still in France! 2 Nights on the French side of lake Geneva was £150 whilst a whopping £800 the Swiss side! Beautiful doesn’t really cut it. It’s like a soft focus cardboard cut out of blues and snow capped mountains and gentle clouds. It doesn’t look real. But once you strip off to your swims and jump in it’s very real… it’s fresh and easy to see why when you glance at the ice in the distance! A grassy park under trees with bright purple flowers is next to the lake. We warm up in the sun. It’s been a beautiful day but then after dinner the skies change and a storm comes in fast. We went for a stroll for sunset but it’s a full pelt run home as the lightening strikes and thunder booms. Once in, I’m done for! My body falls into bed and I hope for wellness by morn. So from sick to swim, Sun to storm, there wasn’t a dull moment!
France, deuxième partie
Day 44
So today the weather is due to rain in the afternoon… we have hardly had any bad weather (shouldn’t have said that!) so we try and get out reasonably early, for us! We intend to walk to a bird observatory but half way through we realise it’s a considerably longer walk than first thought and decide to detour straight to the lake. Currently it’s calm and dry so we plop back in the water. It is icy cold but delightful. Wilson even shivers a bit, but that might be excitement for the ball we are throwing. It’s so quiet with no wind, it’s just perfectly still. We wander to get a drink but the place we try says ‘no, we are closed the rain is coming in 2 hours!’. They are taking it seriously! We pootle back to the apartment to get the car to whizz over to the bird observatory but it’s a no dogs situ. Protecting the flora and fauna innit, fair enough. So Stu and the hound go in hunt for sustenance whilst I get my binoculars out for the birds! Cormorants with impressively large twigs in their beaks, black kites gliding and the impossibly cute Red-crested pochard. It’s a short event in reality so we all reassemble and go back for lunch. We decide that due to the prices rising in our new areas we will cook at home. So I walk to get cooking essentials = wine and Parmesan. We have only seen a sprinkling of this rain they speak of so we defiantly decide to go for an evening walk. It’s wonderful. We walk along the lake until we get to a huge Swiss style hotel with red shutters. 5 stories high with views of little pools cut out in the lake. It looks like you’d film a vintage Hollywood sequence there. Then a few doors down is a massive foreboding hotel of yesteryear that didn’t make it. We wonder why it closed and how it will ever reclaim its former glory. But for now it’s dilapidated, overgrown and the set for a horror film. The Yin to hollywoods Yang. In the end the rain comes! We retreat.
