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We woke to glorious blue sky, not a cloud to be seen anywhere. Kids played boules on the path and rode their bikes round in circles as we ate a mushroom omelette for Bastille day breakfast. Deciding to make the most of it we grabbed our red sleeping mat (the one with the slow puncture we now call our sofa) a picnic of pepper coated dry sausage, a baguette from the camp office, some bottles of squash and headed off to the beach just outside the camp site. We sat on our mat on a tussock of foliage at the edge of the beach, some kind of succulent plant that was spikier than it looked, and spent the day relaxing in the sun. We watched boats glide out of the small port up a channel in the sand which from our vantage point made them appear to be sailing on the beach itself. The beach gradually filled with more people, children played in the gentle waves, men stalked the grassy wetland areas to the East of the beach clearly foraging for something but we couldn’t decide what, and we munched our picnic and sunflower seeds until the late afternoon when the kite surfers started making for the water with their large kites swinging around alarmingly above our heads. A couple more bottles of red back at camp and a tinned paella was enough to knock us out, it’s tiring sitting around all day.

It had rained a lot during the night and because the litre and a half of red wine I’d hidden in my stomach the night before had made me careless about checking the flysheet some dampness had got in. We cheered ourselves up of a breakfast treat of bacon and scrambled eggs while Michael and his friend packed up, planning to drive to Biarritz. Washing and chores took up the rest of the grey morning but a bottle of nice Bordeaux wine from the camp office went down well with lunch. We walked along the beach watching kite surfers enjoying the windy day and a few brave sun bathers tucked behind flapping wind breaks or tussocks of grass in the dunes, making the most of the scarce rays of sun. Another bottle from a local chateau accompanied a rather nice ratatouille with lardons that Kez cooked for dinner before we strolled round the small local port choosing which of the yachts we might buy for a round the world voyage of the future.

Thankfully the atrocious music had stopped around midnight and the children and tipsy dancers stopped shouting at each other soon after. The morning sun was pleasant and we dithered about whether we should pack up and move on, stay put until after Bastille day on Monday or just shift our stuff to the quieter (slightly) municipal site over the road. In the end we spent the day chatting to Michael about various things like the Swiss national service, computers and photography, his travels in Oz, our adventures so far etc etc. We decided to stay put for the holiday weekend and Michael drove me to the supermarché where I stocked up on enough food for the long weekend. We dreaded what sort of noise would kick off this evening being a Saturday night and with the camp site rapidly reaching capacity, but it turned out there was no ‘entertainment’ tonight, and the kids were generally more bearable. The evening had brought some chilly Atlantic winds and having feasted on chicken and cheese sauce with potatoes, peas and carrots, and having finished the red wine we zipped the weather out and relaxed on the new pillows I’d bought because our beany cushions had become slack.

We had tossed up whether to stay or leave for most of the morning as the weather was cloudy with some heavyish showers passing over, but eventually we packed up near lunch time, deciding to move on at least a few miles. After a leisurely pootle along the beaches and waterfront paths out of Andernos we got back on the piste cyclables to head South, then West around the Bassin. We stopped for lunch by a high water tower which was an unusual feature on the piste and a tiny frog posed for some macro shots on Kez’s arm. As we began the Westerly leg along the Southern shore of the Bassin the weather turned against us and showered heavily while we tried to find a reasonably priced site. We headed for a municipal situated next to a beach at Gujan, found the entrance, booked in, set up, then realised the municipal was actually a seperate site across the track and over the fence, with fewer children and nicer pitches. A swiss chap called Michael had made the same mistake but neither of us was inclined to move and on investigation we found the price to be similar anyway. Michael had three months to travel and had come from Luzern in his small car with a tent and was meeting a friend arriving by train tomorrow. Michael had done a lot of travelling in Australia and an Aussie twang was detectable in his excellent English. Children ran around the pitches and soon after we’d finished a dinner of bolognaise a disco kicked off at the end of the camp site playing Abba, Grease medleys and a lot of Boney M at great volume. We rolled our eyes at Michael who was bravely trying to read a book as a woman started karaokeing traditional French folk songs, we gave up and zipped in for the night.

Our new healthy approach to breakfast meant we munched cereal bars, bananas and yoghurt instead of chocolatey viennoise or sticky pain au raisins, joy. We chatted to the Dutch cyclists some more before we left about routes, the weather etc. They were staying put today, following a one day on, one day off the bikes regime. They seemed impressed that we were travelling so light which made me happy. Their racks had been piled high with stuff bungeed on precariously and he was towing a trailer full of stuff as well. A large heavy looking canvas tent, deck chairs and all sorts of homely comforts most cycle tourists leave behind. I’d always felt that we were carrying too much, but this lot proved that you don’t have to saw the handle off your toothbrush and studiously weigh every piece of equipment to enjoy a good cycle tour, just bring the lot. After exchanging good lucks and au revoirs we rolled South through Lacanau and joined another piste cyclable which took us down the East side of the lake and through the bracken carpeted pine forests that seemed to cover much of the area. We surprised a deer that was foraging near the path in an area cleared of trees and stopped to watch it springing away over the bracken to a safe distance from where it turned and eyed us suspiciously twitching its tail. We passed four girls in summer dresses, straw hats and creaky looking town bikes laden with camping gear who seemed to struggling a bit before the path brought us to the town of Arés on the Bassin de Arcachon, a vast bay ten miles across with many ports, tourism and industry along its shores. We cycled down to the tiny Port Ostréicole for some lunch and found a picnic table next to a quiet lake with a pair of bolshy swans that made Kez nervous, herons, a large water rat that made little grunting noises as it swam away and lots of ducks. We took our time over lunch looking across the bay with the binoculars and watching eagles over head before cycling back up into the town to find a camp site. There are a lot round here but they seem to be expensive. One that we fancied could only offer us a gravelly pitch apologetically, ‘We are very small’, and we passed a couple with tariffs over €20 before settling for one next to an air strip inland a bit. It was expensive anyway at €16 and we didn’t think much of the pitch, but with free wi-fi in the bar it would do us for a night. We sat in the scarce shade of the low hedge on our pitch trying to work up the enthusias to erect the tent when a cheery young bloke in sun glasses and surfer shorts poked his head through the hedge behind us, gesticulating at the tent and babbling in French. I understood the word tent as he pointed and replied with a tentative ‘Oui?’ at which he bounded happily through the hedge to help us put it up. After 37 camp sites we really didn’t need help with our little tent but he hopped around enthusiastically as we whipped it up and said ‘ahh easy little tent’ in French. We had a sort of conversation in which we learned he’d been living on the site for three months in his caravan and Kez noticed he had horribly blistered sunburned feet. After we thanked him for his ‘help’ he pushed back through the hedge and left us looking at each other amused.
I bought pork and salad for dinner and a packet of ‘Hurry Up!’ chocolate biscuits for Kez, which seemed appropriate, and we sat in the bar until it closed tapping away on the internet and being nibbled by mosquitos. Must remember to put long trousers on in the evenings.