20th Nov – 28th Nov 2024
Our stop in Châtelaillon-Plage was not really to spend time here, but because it was on the train line into La Rochelle. This was a place that we had been to before that we were looking forward to revisiting. The next day we strolled the 1.5km from camp to the station and and within 15 minutes we were delivered to the very scenic port town of La Rochelle. We had our usual itinerary planned: walk, look at stuff, find restaurant for lunch, eat and drink, walk a bit more, go home. We executed it perfectly.
The harbour and its protective guard towers are very photogenic and before long we had found the busy market place. The weekly market was in full swing which initially we observed from a distance whilst savouring a coffee at a nearby café before walking through the countless stalls selling delicious looking meat/cheese/pastries etc. This being a fishing port, there was also a very impressive array of seafood on offer too. Our wanderings continued, taking in the beautiful town hall. This was partly destroyed by a large fire in 2013 and has been lovingly restored. Most of the priceless artwork inside was saved by firefighters and employees who mobilsed quickly and carried the pieces to safety.
We decided that we fancied a plate of oysters as part of our lunch but rather than getting these in a restaurant we walked back to the fish market. Here an outside stall was serving a shucked dozen of large plump oysters for €15 with the optional side order of a 100ml of white wine in a paper cup for €2 each. This seemed very reasonable. We ate (and drank) these under an umbrella, sheltering from the light rain, whilst trying to a politely fend off conversation with a persistently chatty French chap who definitely was unaware that he was interrupting our bliss moment. The oysters were utterly delicious.
After this we found somewhere very satisfactory for a late lunch then later sauntered back to the station and headed back to Châtelaillon.
We had planned to head off the next day but the weather forecast was hideous. Torrential rain and gale force winds soon arrived and the decision to stay put was an easy one. We were fully prepared for a ‘lock-in’ day with food in the fridge, water in the tanks and plenty of data allowance for a Netflix marathon. Davide has enough space for days like this and we are happy loafers.
The next morning, after a very cold night, the weather had finally settled and the only casualty of the wind was the bike cover. This has been slowly disintegrating over the past few months and up until this point was made up of about 25% gaffer tape. Now, following ongoing repairs, it is about 50% tape. It just had to last another week.
The other casualty of our stay here was my digestive system. I was feeling decidedly peaky this morning and Nick joined me in my gastrointestinal disquiet later in the day. Although there had been a bit of a delay, the chief suspect was a dozen delicious oysters.
We continued our trajectory north and headed to the south Brittany coast port town of Vannes. We arrived in the middle of the day and spent a few hours feeling shabby and lamenting our slightly compromised plumbing arrangements. As sunset approached we were feeling a bit better and dragged ourselves out for a short walk around a nearby small penninsula which was beautiful. The Brittany coast is rocky and rugged with large tidal swings making it really interesting and very different from the Med.
We shuffled home and had an early night. Unfortunately our camping spot was very close to a car park that was obviously popular with young people in noisy cars playing loud music late at night. We didn’t sleep much until it finally rained at about 3am, ending their party. Hoorah for bad weather! We’ll take the din of raindrops on the roof over the cacophony of high spirited youth anyday. We agreed that we weren’t going to stay another night here. Night-time noise caused by humans is one of the things that we find it difficult to tolerate.
The next morning, both feeling a bit better, we caught the bus into the town centre and were happy to find that it was market day in Vannes. Rather than being based in a central square this market, mainly consisting of beautiful food stalls, was spread throughout the streets of the old town, giving the whole place a lovely atmosphere. The old town itself was gorgeous and laden with lopsided medieval buildings and narrow streets. It was of those unlauded places that is as beautiful as any of the tourist ‘hot spots’ that we had seen on our travels, yet we felt like the only tourists in town. After exploring town, which had some lovely shops too, we headed down to the marina. This was an unusual affair as the boats are moored along the length of a blind ending canal that connects Vannes town centre with the sea. From here we braved the threatening dark clouds in the sky and walked home rather than getting the bus.
Moving on mid afternoon is an unusual routine for us, but we not going to risk another noisy night. We picked a spot mid-Brittany that had a quiet, secluded, wooded site next to a lake with our name on it. It was only about 40 minutes away so having done laundry and shopping on the way, we arrived just before dusk. That night we slept like babies.
The next day we continued our trans-Breton trajectory to the north coast and a place called Trévon-Tréguigrec. Our initial approach was kiboshed by a road closure but we eventually arrived after a scenic detour. Here there was a beautiful wide bay, flanked by rocky headlands and a perfect surf beach. It was a mild 18 deg C and there were plenty of surfers in the water and even a few non-wetsuited swimmers. We did not brave the waves ourselves. Those days of summer are well behind us. Cold water swimming is definitely not our thing! Our site, another Camping CarPark, a mere stone’s throw from the beach, was almost empty, but it was easy to imagine there would be a fair jostle for a space here in the peak season. This would be a great place to camp for a beach holiday.
We did a couple of walks here. The first was up the beach to the next bay on the day we arrived. At the other end of the bay was a large ugly building that had an amazing view over the beach and out to sea. This turned out to be a rehabilitation hospital. Awful seventies architecture aside, what an amazing place to come to recuperate and rehabilitate. Otherwise the place was dead with all of the few cafés and businesses shut. The next day we walked inland up the valley through some woods. There was allegedly a very pretty loop track through a nature reserve but the recent storm had knocked down so many trees and branches that it became impassable and we had to turn around. We took the long route home through the village and called at the shop. This, predicatably, was shut when we arrived. A long lunch break is sacrosanct in this part of the world. I quite respect that. It would just be nice if they stated their opening times on-line so that we hadn’t made an unecessary walk up a steephill to get there. Just an idea…. Nick slogged back up the hill later for our ‘essential items’ for which I have no recall. Probably chocolate supplies. For our second night here we had the site all to ourselves. Private and exclusive camping.
The next day we headed east along the coast to our last stop of the trip. This was in a place called St-Jacut-De-La-Mer which was essentially a small fishing village strung out along the length of a small north-south orientated peninsula that jutted out into a bay that was part of the Gulf of St Malo. The whole place was again a sleepy, resting, out of season holiday destination with only a few other campers on our site. The rocky coast line here has a big trick up its sleeve, which is its massive tidal ranges of up to 13 m, the biggest in Europe. This means that the coastline changes dramatically with the tides and this facilitated one of most interesting walks of our trip.
About 500m off the northern tip of the peninsula is a small archipelago of islands which are accessible by foot at low tide. In a leisurely 2-3 hour round trip walk it is possible to walk across the sand, up and over a small island and along and round a larger island to a lookout. We had walked up to the end of the peninsula at high tide on our first day here and slightly increduously looked over the seemingly vast expanse of water between us and the islands. It was hard to imagine it being walkable. There was a big sign here warning not to tackle the walk without consulting the tide timetable, and not to start the walk back any later than 90 minutes after low tide. We strolled back to camp and Nick replaced his broken bike pedal. A new set had been Amazon purchased, posted to Jan who had brought them with him on the train when he came to see us in Bordeaux. Travelling problems solved with the assistance from an international mule! Thanks Jan.
The next day we got up early to catch low tide and cycled back to the jump off point, which was 3km from camp. Low and behold the sand was quickly emerging from the depths and we could indeed walk to the islands. We initially saw no-one else but did follow two sets of foot prints across the sand banks, giving us some idea of the best way to approach the islands and letting us know that we were not alone. It was a beautiful morning and a stunning walk. Definitely worth setting the alarm for. We passed our co-explorers as they were heading home but apart from a couple of folks wing-foiling from one of the island’s beaches, it was gloriously deserted. There are some privately owned holiday homes on the larger of the islands, which much be an idyllic place to spend summer days. We were very jealous.
We had a lazy afternoon once we got home. There was Breton fish soup for lunch and an interesting ‘fridge scrapings’ dinner to eat up the fresh supplies. In the evening we finished watching the final season of Madmen. This had been an all-consuming, seven seasons of televisual magnificence. What a show!
So finally our departure day was upon us. We had an overnight ferry booked out of St Malo, which was only about 30 minutes drive away. Although this didn’t sail until 7.45pm we headed there mid morning with a view to spending some time in St Malo. We have sailed in and out of this port several times but never spent any time in the town itself. This seemed a good opportunity to check it out. We also couldn’t leave France without the obligatory supplies of wine, cheese and canned delicacies so we started the day with a trip to the biggest supermarket we could find and filled a trolley with delicious stuff. Once this was all stashed away safely we found a parking spot near the old town and walked in. What a splendid place this is.
There is an impressive, imposing wall that protected the town from past attack, and continues to protect it from the wrath of winter storms and inside the walls all the buildings are quite uniform, well restored and the maze of narrow streets are lined with cobbles. The whole place is circled with yellow sandy beaches and an interesting looking lido. In a warm summers week this would be a fine place to spend some time, with barely any need to drive any further into France if one had just arrived on the ferry. We walked the walls, purchased a last gift or two and headed to the ferry terminal mid-afternoon.
We were about to embark on the most nerve wracking (for me – because I am the worrier) part of the trip. Leaving Europe.
Many of you will know/remember that we are travelling on our NZ passports as this theroretically allowed us to extend our stay beyond the standard ’90-day in every 180-day Schengen allowance’. In the 1960s New Zealand had negotiated a stand-alone 90 day extension to the 90 day Schengen allowance for NZ citizens with the majority of the original countries of the EU block. It was technically meant to be agreed on entry to each individual participating country, but there are no border posts to approach any more. It was also possibly not common knowledge amongst all border officials and honouring the agreement was entirely at the discretion of the individual border officer that was to check us out. I had prepared for this moment. I had a detailed record of our days spent in each country. I could verify this with banking records. I had a link to an obscure document on my phone. I had prepared my speech in French to explain why we had been in the Schengen area for 210 days. We checked in with the ferry staff then I took a deep breath as we approached the French border police kiosk and we handed over our passports.
“You are from New Zealand?” The border policeman asked in accented English as he flicked through the pages, looking for our entry stamps.
“Yes”, we replied.
“You have very pretty passports”, he commented. Stamp,stamp. “Have a good trip, goodbye”.
That was it. No questions. No detainment. No fine. No deportation. No exclusion from the Schengen area for 3 years. It worked! Hoorah! This had been slightly hanging over me our entire trip so it was a massive relief.
By a twist of fate we were the first to arrive in the embarkation lanes but were one of the last to be loaded onto the ferry three hours later. We were quite bored, but happy to be able to make tea and snacks and have a loo to use whilst we waited. If we’d known it was going to take so long we could have put a movie on. It was completely dark by the time we were loaded meaning that there was nothing to see as we set off an hour or so later, the 12 hour crossing to Portsmouth being happily uneventful and fairly calm. We dined and had a couple of drinks in the bar and we both managed to get some sleep in our narrow bunk beds. One advantage of being last on the ferry was that we were one of the first off and we flew through immigration and a cursory van inspection for stowaways before we hit the road north. Our next stop was a weekend in Hereford at my brother and sister-in-law’s, a great way to manage ‘end-of-trip-blues’. Fran and I even managed to sneak in a Park run whilst we were there . I found that the arrival of winter was also quite useful to help burst the travel bubble. We have rented a cozy cottage in Shropshire for 3 months and are looking forward to log fires, central heating, baths and a flushing toilet!
This trip has almost been too epic to summarize.
It was nearly seven months of mostly visiting cities, towns and villages with a few lakes and coasts thrown in for good measure.
We have driven through: Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Italy and France.
We have visited some of Europe’s great and fine cities: Düsseldorf, Hanover, Berlin, Gdansk, Krakow, Budapest, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Bratislava, Prague, Salzburg, Vienna, Venice, Verona, Rome, Florence and Nice.
We have seen lots of really, really, really old places: churches, cathedrals, castles, fortresses, houses and inns. The ancient ruins of Pompeii and Rome were mind blowing.
We experienced Auschwitz.
We have come across many new, and unintelligable, languages.
We saw the Baltic, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Lakes Balaton, Bled, Titisee, Attersee and Garda,the noteable Rivers Rhine, Rhône, Danube, Vistula, Ljubljanica,Vltava, Arno and Tiber.
We drank beer in the East and wine in the West.
We drove nearly 9000 miles and I was behind the wheel for not a single one of them. I am a happy passenger. Nick is a happy driver. We never travel so far in one day that he needs help driving.
We met up with: Anke and Meike, Benedikt and Suzi, Mum & Cliff, Rick and Kris, Nicholas and Julian, Marie-Claude,Paul and Sophie, and Jan.
We stayed in 89 different locations and filled the tank with diesel 35 times. I can see no helpful reason to add up how much this cost.
Davide himself was epic. He is a fine tool for life on the road and is now clean and tidy and tucked up in his pyjamas for the winter. Next adventure? A month touring Ireland in April. See you then!
Auf Wiedersehen! Do widzenia! Búcsú! Zbogom! Zbohom! Ahoj! Adijo! Ciao! Au revoir! Goodbye!
