The morning was cloudy so we decided to press on today. Kez had a bit of a stressful time as our decamping disturbed a couple more spiders of the type that had ambushed her from the toilet roll yesterday. Luckily though I was available this time to leap on them with my size 11s as she squeaked and pointed out the unfortunate stripey forest dwellers. We took the road South deciding to leave the piste to the pootlers and pootled our way through Lit-et-Mixe and Vielle Sainte Girons. Although we were once again cycling with the traffic it was nice to be seeing the goings on in the towns instead of bypassing it all on the quiet pistes. We made good time and stopped for lunch on the shores of the Étang de Léon, another large lake with beaches and watersports, and more to the point, a very handy picnic table. We found our intended camp site and for the first time on our journey we were refused entry. ‘One tent for one night?’ I asked as usual in my best French.
‘Non’ came the simple reply. Apparently they were fully booked and I could quite believe it looking at the amount of kids running around. We sat down on one of the benches and decided on a new destination. The area was smothered in camp sites so it wasn’t a problem, but finding a cheapish one wasn’t so easy. We cycled a mile or two down the road and found two camp sites directly opposite each other. A three star charging €26 or a two star charging €15. We’re definitely more the two star types so we booked in and were lead to our pitch by a tired faced woman on a creaky bicycle. ‘Follow me please’ she said.
‘Are you fast?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Sometimes.’ she replied as we followed her inappropriate black lacy g-string up the dusty lumpy path. We were shown to a reasonably sized pitch with a shady tree which is good, but we were bordered by five other pitches with tents and a large caravan. One pitch had noisy French youngsters who were drinking some kind of spirit, clearly to excess and we felt like we were camping in a gipsy slum. Thankfully the boozers had a drunken tiff before passing out quite early and were quiet from then on. With our washing line adding to the shanty town atmosphere we decided it wasn’t so bad, just for one night.
We strolled down the road towards the beach which took us past noisy funfares, other crammed camping sites with mobile homes packed inches from each other and a noisy circus ring called ‘Toro Piscine’ which we’d seen hundreds of posters advertising for the last week or so. ‘Bull swimming pool’ didn’t sound much fun to us so we walked on over a huge sand dune just in time to watch the sun dip sedately into the Atlantic.