I am motivated to write this blog by at least 3 reasons that I can think of before I even start this sentence. Firstly, there is finally some cloud in the sky. Needless to say, coming from Ireland we were always going to be under a cloudless sky a lot more that we were used to, but the reality has far outshone the expectation as it’s has been literally sunny day in day out pretty much non-stop since May. Climate discombobulation to the extent that we have both put on weight, but also in a quiet way, a liberation, a release from muck, from the life leeching smell of dampness, from greyness. And the dawning wonder that every day is a grand day for the drying, and a beach day, has seeped into our bones slowly and surely as aging. Weather matters. So this onslaught of one day of cloud with thunder forecast for later reminds me how poorly I have kept to my plan to write a daily blog, and how timely it would be to recap some of the stuff we got up to over the summer, and now that something resembling normal service is likely to be restored in terms of weather and the discombobulating effects of extreme heat and sunshine ebb, I’d like to recommit myself to the habit and the practice of writing about our life here in this corner of France that feels a bit like it is waking up from a summer long fiesta. More cyclists on the roads and the trails, some walkers where before there was none, the return of wildlife which disappeared completely over the summer, and continual references on the radio and TV to ‘la rentrée’, the return to school after the holidays. C’est parti. The most consistent thing we did throughout the Summer was to attend the weekly craft market in our camper van. We took part in two markets, in Sète and in Bouzigues. The market in Sète was help on a slender strip of pedestrian space found in front of the splendidly named hotel sables d’or and created from the apex of a rough triangle created from 3 angled streets. In short it was not a great location. It was we gathered, or I surmised, a project of the local Mayor to bring some culture to this somewhat non-moneyed holiday resort area a few kilometres away, along the corniche, from the feted old centre of this fishing port. Each time we went it was a frantic assault to get a temporary parking spot to unload our stall stuff, then another bout of franticness as I searched for a parking spot in peak summer at a sea front resort town, to leave the camper for the duration of the event. All with two dogs agitated by the heat, the unloading, the moving, the separating, and like humans, unnerved by the novelty. The markets finished at 11, at which time I’d go retrieve the van, again look for a parking spot close to the market space that wasn’t blocking traffic, load up, and then we would head to our nightly resting spot, a beachside car park about 10km back up the isthmus that separates the lagoon of Thau from the Med. We’d park up, go the beach, sit for a bit, then back to the van for a bottle of wine and bed. Next morning, we’d try to intercept the ‘croissant man’ as he drove around in his dark blue-green van selling breads, croissants and sweet breakfast treats. He had a ‘little’ siren, it sounded like a kid’s cop car, that drew us out of our abodes on wheels like moths to a flame. The location was la plage des trois digues’. There was a camper van area which cost €10 per night and, adjacent, a car park that we could squeeze into under the hight restriction barrier set a 2m 10cm. Our camper is 2m 6cm in height. On a related point, motorway tolls in France use 2m as the height to separate fees between cars and vehicles bigger than cars. The cost differential is 50%. A motorway toll of €5 in a car becomes €7.50 in a van. Our camper exhibits Schrödinger like behaviour, sometimes it’s charged as a car and sometimes as a van. The same applied to the parking I securing in Sète. I just about squeezed under the barrier on level ground, but when I tried to enter a parking area on an incline, I hit the barrier. Lucking it was suspended on chains, and not fixed, and thus did no damage to our ‘Desirée’, as she, the camper is very feminine, is named according to the previous owner. One Friday night, the weekend of July 14th, we were driving out of Sète and in the other direction, on the other side of the road, there was a stream of vehicles, not moving much at all. There’d been fireworks over Séte that evening and I assume they’d driven out the isthmus to get that killer view. Now they were stuck in traffic and not happy. One frustrated driver asked me if there’d been an accident. I was driving slowly and by the time my slow mind had processed the French into a question I understood, I was already past him and could just about get a backwards non in his direction, his face now perplexed at my inability to handle the most simple of human interaction. Both of us had our driver side windows down. The glory of summer and a long way from Ireland. One Saturday morning, after our croissants, 2 bike cops, one young one middle-aged, both clean-shaven, typecasting for a sunny afternoon TV cop show where all the crimes are local and all the locals are characters, walked through the parking area telling us one by one that camping was not allowed in this section and that we had to stay in the camping zone. We ignored his direction and did not meet another cop for the duration of the summer. We also ignored the sign that said no dogs on the beach during high season. We were not alone and for the most part dogs and humans rubbed along just fine summer long on the long, widish beach, except for a few obligatory incidents, one of them being Giuseppe peeing on a woman’s hat.
Pris Du Jour
50 Expresso coffee pods €9.78 (€4.20 off regular price)