Velodyssee

Last of the coastal days today before heading inland to Nantes and going north through the centre of Brittany back to Roscoff .

The day started rather earlier than hoped at about 5am. Despite the hotel’s full name being the Relais du Silence Domaine Le Martinet the silence part failed to live up to expectation! We were stupidly sleeping with the windows open to try and keep the room cool at night, however all that did was allow in just one or two pesky mosquitoes which you only know are there when they buzz like mad in your ear. I woke up to the sound of Mrs Nelson madly slapping her own face in an attempt to swat the blighter before it had plunged its piercing proboscis into her neck. Doomed to failure! We now both have some nice itchy blotches developing on arms and faces. Having been so rudely awakened getting back to sleep became impossible as the blinking dawn chorus had started up like a layered symphonic composition. Two wood pidgeons we’re giving low level alternating coos to each other whilst in the background some blackbirds were tunefully singing as a team and above all of that the wheeling screeching seagulls reminded you of the proximity to the sea. Just about dozed off again at 7.00am and the electronic gate into the car park behind the hotel clicked opened and grated its way over the tarmac to let in the chattering hotel workers who were kindly going to make my breakfast which I hoped would be at least 2 hours away. Then came the infuriating universal beep beep beep of the reversing bin lorry which finally put paid to any chance of getting back to sleep so we just got up and rubbed cream into our nice new mozzy bites.

Today’s route took us on a final passing through the land of oysters, mussels, salt production and other fishy industries. Did you know that an oyster becomes an adult at the age of three at which time it develops a gonad which can be either eggs or sperm. When the sea temperature is right (between 20 and 30 degC) and the salinity is above 10ppt, it takes just one oyster to release the contents of its gonad to trigger a mass release by all its neighbours this creating a sort of local sexual stew. Fertilisation happens and fertilised eggs just drift aimlessly around for a while until they develop into a larva. Incredibly these larvae can’t swim horizontally so they shmooze about for a few weeks in the ebb and flow of the tide until they grow a foot and then they hop about looking for some nice smooth rock to perch on. Once they are satisfied with their new home they metamorphose completely into what is called spat. They grow a lovely new home for themselves in the form of a calcium shell and then just gorge themselves for 3 years on passers by at which point they become an adult – and round we go again. Also at 3 years old you become the prey and a big beefy French fisherman comes along and prizes you off your lovely rock and puts you in a bucket then opens you up, puts you on a plate and a mozzy-bitten English cyclist squirts lemon all over you and eats you whole. What a life that was!!!!

Repeat for mussels but change ending to – cooked in pot with white wine garlic and cream but still eaten by itchy English cyclist.

Whole communities have grown up around oysters and mussels- not always the most aesthetic of places but certainly interesting.

This coast is also renowned for the lazy fisherman. There are hundreds of these fishing huts with nets hanging down from them. The lazy fisherman’s day goes like this: Get up and have a Gaulloise and a pastis. Go to your fishing hut, lower net into sea at incoming tide. Have another Gaulloise, pastis and 5 hour nap whilst waiting for tide to come in and fill your net with unsuspecting fish. Get up just as tide is going out again and haul in net. Take home catch and give to wife. Have a Gaulloise and a pastis whilst waiting for wife to fillet and cook your fish for you. Eat fish with cheap white wine and dry baguette. Have a Gaulloise and got to bed. Repeat!!

They also produce very fine sea salt here, (probably from the sea water), but didn’t go on the salt marsh guided tour so don’t know how they do that.

Mmmm….. now where did I leave my boat when I parked it last night…… pontoon 151 berth 26 or was it pontoon 26 berth 151 …..

Still scoffing and drinking our way up the French Atlantic coast and tonight we have relieved the ocean of 7 more oysters and about 100 mussels. I’m really getting into this game.

The little hotel in St Jean de Monts with the garden oasis among the candy floss fairgroundland that we were in last night provided us with a sumptuous homemade breakfast which fuelled the boilers for the next leg of the trip to Bouin.

The first 15 miles we spent on forest tracks winding about on gritty tracks when we could have just stayed on the asphalt road and done the mileage in half the time! However the big event of the day was passing from the mainland onto the Ile de Noirmoutier via a very long and high road bridge. The allotted Velodyssee route stays on the island for about 5km before leaving again via Le Passage to Gois. This is a 2.5 mile long causeway which is built on a raised sand spit and which gets inundated at high tide and submerged under 13feet of water. So the critical thing to know is when is low tide because then you have about 1.5 hours each side of that to get across otherwise you are scuppered for the next 9 hours waiting for the tide to come in and then out again so that you can cross. This is the only way onto and off the island apart from the road bridge at Pointe de la Fosse at the southern end.

By sheer meticulous planning and good fortune we arrived just as the tidal water was sloshing off the asphalt on its way out to the ocean. This gave us a 3 hour window to get across and muck about waiting to see the tide come in again and cover the road once again. For mucking about read ‘drinking beer, eating ice cream and drinking coffee.’

In the event that you attempt to cross when the tide is rushing back in again but realise you are not going to make it without disappearing into the briny the French have kindly provided three rescue shelters at intervals across the causeway that you can clamber up to save yourself. I’m afraid your car (or your bike) gets lost beneath the waves and is then kaput with seawater. Apparently this is a very regular occurrence as naive tourists make a last minute dash to get to the other side to avoid having to wait for 9 hours!!

What gets revealed at low tide is a vast expanse of mudflats beloved of cockle pickers and clam hunters. Folk drive onto the causeway and park and then fan out across the salty mud to look for gritty gristly bivalves that they can chuck in a pan of hot water and have for tea.

One fella was demonstrating the art of getting out onto the mudflats to his kids but made a bit of an ar*e of it and just about fell in himself.

It was all jolly good fun and fortunately no tourists, cars, bikes or children were lost this day at Le Passage de Gois.

It’s Monday morning after the night before and the Promenade George’s Clemenceau has returned to normal. The chanting, banner-waving Marseillaise singers have all disappeared ( most probably still in bed with a hangover) and the seafront has been returned to the early morning joggers, crazy morning dippers and dog-walking grannies. We sailed along with ease en route northwards to St Jean de Monts, passing from the front prom into the older port area at the northern end.

The problem with travelling from south to north on this trip is that the prevailing winds are from the north-west and today we covered about 36 miles into a strong blustery headwind (or vent de tete as we have discovered). Even the downhill bits felt like uphill!

The coastline is pretty spectacular with a combination of great long beaches, rocky outcrops and wooded headlands. Generally the cycling provision is really excellent with dedicated well signed routes right along the coast including through the towns where traffic has often been reduced to one lane with the other lane given over to bikes. (Derek -don’t come here for your holidays!!).

However the persistent headwind, strong sunshine and rolling nature of the route ‘forced’ a cold beer stop in a small beachside bar called Chez Yoyo’s at Brétignolles-sur-Mer. The cold beer stops at lunchtime and the obligatory ice cream stop in the late afternoons have become ever more frequent on this trip and have replaced the Kaffe und Kuken stops which were so much a highlight from last year’s trip to Slovenia. Mr Yo-yo promptly poured out two very large beers (I’m sure I asked for small ones) which we just had to gulp down in his shady, sand-filled bar. We spent a slightly woozy afternoon careering through twisty forest tracks and battling the headwinds over the cliff tops. Eventually St Jean de Monts hoved into view and using Google maps navigated our way to our hotel called Babord-Tribord (Port – Starbord). The thing about Google maps is that it doesn’t tell you which are the busy streets full of people and which aren’t and the directions sent us along Rue Neuve which turned out to be the narrowest and busiest pedestrianised street in the whole of Poitu-Charente! It was absolutely mobbed with families coming off the beach, families still heading to the beach, queues of people lined up in their hundreds waiting to buy ice creams, barbapapa (candy floss – literally fathers beard), chips, paninis, burgers, chi-chis (horrible finger shaped donuts covered in sugar or dipped in chocolate), croustillons (horrible round shaped donuts covered in sugar or dipped in chocolate), gauffres piled high with chantilly cream, crepes smeared with chocolate, rubbery unchewable sweets stretched to the length of an Amazonian python, sugary fluorescent coloured granitas that stain your lips, flip-flops, gaudy shorts and tee shirts, buckets and spades.

In addition there were 3 shops in close proximity offering you the privilege of letting small fish eat your feet to nibble off unwanted skin (I reckon that if I had stuck my sweaty cycling feet in one of those tanks the small fish would have lost and turned belly up) and also this street supported a mini fairground incorporating dodgems, a kiddies mini thrill ride, fishing for canards and three large slot machine arcades! All this was happening in a street about 5m wide along which we are trying to push our fully laden dust ridden bikes to find a hotel. ‘Pardon, exusez-moi, oops desole, excusez-moi,pardon’. Eventually gave up and turned up a side street and escaped. This place is like Largs on steroids!

Fortunately, despite our hotel being near to this boisterous gastronomic hell Le patron has created a charming green oasis of calm with a small garden adorned with coastal artefacts and beautiful plants and after a welcome aperitif and a homemade sardine pate we were recovered enough to head out once more for a shot on the dodgems (joke)!

Need to go for a lie down now!

We left La Tranche with the Bastille Day cordite still lingering in the morning heat. It was Sunday so the locals and the visitors were going through their usual sunny Sunday activities, going to the beach, having picnics in the forest, fishing in the canals, back garden bbqs etc. But there was a palpable air of World Cup fever mixing with the cordite in the air this Sunday. It was ‘le jour du grand match de football’.

Cars paraded flags, all age groups were going round with ‘rouge blanc bleu’ stripes painted on their cheeks and houses were draped in banners and bunting – some to extremes:

Last night Bastille Day, today WC champions. France is a country on a high of football, fireworks and the Marseillaise.

Most people seem to know the full version of this national anthem and have been giving it full licks now for 2 days. We arrived in Sables d’Olonne in time to watch the match and, between you and me, I think they were a bit lucky (not that I said that to anybody!).

After the final whistle the place erupted and spilled out onto the streets – toddlers to grannies, honed youths to pot-bellied gendarmes, groups in cars with horns blazing and passengers with trumpets hanging out of the windows, motorbikes revving, cyclists wearing berets and with strings of onions round their necks (well perhaps not onions). The Promenade George’s Clemenceau in Sables d’Olonne is about 2 miles long and it was absolutely rammed with people in a state of joyful delirium.

At one point an old couple came out onto their first floor balcony holding a very large but cooked lobster and used it’s not inconsiderably large claws to conduct a full-throated version of La Marseillaise belted out by a group of people on the street below.

Planes flew low over the bay dragging banners stating Champions du Monde’. On the beach a massive party had erupted and people of all ages were drinking beer and falling about in the sea. Probably some of them are still there hopefully not floating face down.

It was a great night for the French. The highlight for me was seeing Presidents Putin and Macron getting soaked in the final presentation ceremony and the Croatian President just happy to be there hugging everybody that came her way !!

Ah well, back to normal. Another 36 cycling miles lie ahead in the unbroken sun to get to St Jean de Monts.

As we rolled out of La Rochelle this morning the local army and police force had turned out en masse to form an honour guard for us which we thought was very charming of them. However as we cycled along the line waving at them we got chased away the gendarmes who told us to get out of their Bastille Day parade in front of Monsieur Le Maire.

We had seen from our mapping that the Velodyssee cycle route to our next destination took a large detour inland to circumnavigate around an extensive bay north of La Rochelle. We had a cunning plan to cut this almost 50 mile route in half by cycling onto to the Ile de Re and catching a ferry from St Martin de Re to La Tranche-sur-Mer. But detailed investigation revealed that the private ferry service did not take bikes on their boats so our distance-saving plan went up in smoke. There was nothing for it but to get our heads down and get on with it.

The first 15 miles were OK as we rode alongside the Canal de Marans which afforded some tree lined shade but after that the route opened up completely as it crossed the marshlands at the western end of the Marais Poitevin where not a stick of shade was to be found and there are no villages for miles. We had stopped for a cold beer and some water in a small bar in Marans and the patron asked where we were heading. When we told him he shook his head, sucked in his cheeks and did that Gallic ‘ooh la la’ hand gesture. ‘Ca va aller tres chaud cette apres midi Monsieur, il n’y a pas d’ombrage dans Le Marais.’ He wished us ‘Bon courage’ and I could see that look of ‘English fools’ in his eyes as we made off into the shimmering heat.

Sure enough not long after leaving his bar we were riding across the dyke tops bereft of trees and in the blistering 30 degree heat. Armed only with a few litres of kindly donated water we struggled on for a few hours as if cycling across the Sahara desert. The sun was burning a hole in the top of my head. A second dose of factor 20 was applied over the first lot to keep the piercing heat from turning my already lobster coloured skin into more of a ripe tomato hue! The birds of prey circled overhead waiting for us to collapse and die at the side of the track when they would swoop down and rip our eyes out just for starters. The occasional hacienda appeared in the shimmering haze over the horizon and then disappeared just as quickly.

The brackish marsh ditches are partly managed to control water flows and we occasionally had to ride over sluice gates. Then we came across the ‘sluice gate of death’ where over 30 large fish were floating belly up in the water. There was no obvious explanation for this phenomenon except perhaps that the Marais Poitevin has a reputation for insularity and historical interbreeding and maybe some mad wild-eyed farmer type had committed an atrocity and dumped the bodies in the sluice!!

Eventually Tranche sur Mer emerged like a mirage in the haze and we were saved from the clutches of the mad wild-eyed farmers, death from raging thirst and from being burned to a crisp in the merciless sun.

Now we are off to the bar for a beer and probably watch some Bastille Day fireworks before we do it all again tomorrow ! We must be mad!

Btw – the fireworks were average.

Breakfast in our small chamber d’hote in La Rochelle turned out to be a communal affaire with two other guests and the patrons of the establishment which was a very interesting townhouse built in the 1850’s. It takes my brain a few hours to get into gear in a morning these days and being pitched into a full-on French discussion with the everyone was a bit of a challenge. The other two guests eventually departed leaving the two of us and the ‘patrons’ watching us eat the breakfast that they had so lovingly prepared which was a slightly unnerving experience as you feel obliged to say how nice everything is. They cooed with pride as we effused about the little pots of homemade aromatic fruit compote, theirs jams and croissants. They were actually very nice and helpful people even phoning the tourist office in La Rochelle for us to check on some ferry crossing times.

Anyway we eventually got underway riding off into the piercing sun. Luckily riding south to north means no sun in your eyes and a well tanned rear in more senses than one.

Spent most of the day zipping along the coast which has beaches stretching to the horizon and which are full of mussel and oyster beds. Because they are very flat the tide comes racing in at a great rate of knots and, in the time it took to drink a cold beer in a bar, the water had advanced over a couple of hundred metres across the sands.

Arrived in La Rochelle in the late afternoon heat to find the town in full festival mode. It is the annual 4-day long Francofolies musical gathering with accompanying markets, side shows, street musicians, buskers and food-sellers. There were thousands of folk milling about filling every available table in the restaurants surround the harbour. We eventually got sat down at an outdoor table in amongst the hubbub and ordered up some grub. I am about halfway through my giant pot of moules marineres when Carol pointed skywards and said ‘look there thousands of swifts or swallows flying overhead’ at which very moment a great dollop of birdshit landed on my leg. I half thought another load had bombed into my pot of moules and was lurking amongst the shells or in that lovely creamy garlicky liquid that lies at the bottom of the pot. A quick search found nothing but I did sense that the flavour of my dinner had changed somewhat.

Also, mid meal, a troup of 8 heavily armed soldiers in full battle dress walked through the crowds very slowly and very deliberately one behind the other several meters apart. They were eyeballing everyone and everything very carefully as they progressed along the quayside amongst the assembled throng. I think since the various Paris bombings at public events the French government have decided to up the level of visible security presence at major gatherings.

The downside of a well located central hotel just by the quayside is that it sits amongst lots of other bars and restaurants outside which many partying and drunk Frenchmen are prone to gather until the early hours of the morning. Despite having our windows firmly shut drunken strains of tuneless songs came wafting in for hours till everything fell silent at about 5am.

And tomorrow is 14 Juillet – Bastille Day – when we will have to go through all this again and then on Sunday France are in the World Cup final. I sense more sleepless nights ahead!

No, not Roquefort where they make the lovely blue cheese. That is in the south of France. (I made that mistake as well!).

This is Rochefort on the Charente River in western France, more famous for oysters and giant prawns than blue cheese. However, it is also famous, it turns out, for the Corderie Royale, the 375m long royal rope factory(!!!) and home to a full sized reproduction of The Hermione, (no – not her out of Harry Potter), a three- masted 18th century frigate that sailed the Seven Seas and transported Lafayette to Boston to support the pesky Americans who were seeking independence from the British. I guess this was a forerunner of the French ‘farting in our general direction’ (to quote our Python friends). You can do a tour of the repro frigate with all the ropes, cannons, poop decks and all that Jolly Jack Tar stuff (which we did), but more frighteningly we pursuaded ourselves to climb up the rigging in a ‘Go-Ape’ style adventure. This involves getting all harnessed up with carabenas , helmets and all that safety stuff and climbing up masts, rigging, cargo nets and walking across wobbly high wire ladders at giddying heights above a fake frigate deck. Having cycled 30 miles, had no food since breakfast time (this now being 4pm) and having just quaffed a half pint of Leffe beer, I reluctantly agreed to go jigging in the rigging with Mrs N who thought this would be a great hoot. So you pay yer money, have a lackadaisical briefing from the fake French pirates and are given a choice – white, blue or orange helmets. White is for kids and restricted to lower level masts and bowsprits, blue is for the more adventurous and they get to go up beyond poop deck height and orange is for the daredevils and loonies who should no better at 62 years of age. Orange helmets go all the way to the top and have to navigate their way around masts, up the cargo nets, along mast arms and finally throwing themselves off the crows nest 30m from deck level. We got orange helmets!

Well if my bowels hadn’t been so solidified after 2 weeks of baguettes and French cheese I think they would have emptied down my quivering legs and landed on some unsuspecting white helmets 30m below. (Thinking about it, however, my skin-tight Lycra cycling shorts may have stemmed the flow for a while but only for a limited amount of time. It was seriously scary for a vertigo-wimp like me but even more scary was that once you had started there was no going back. There was no escape route and no unclipping to allow any backtracking. To make it worse, I was being followed around this aerial nightmare by two bravado-fuelled French youths who were pushing me on and smirking scornfully into their stripey matelot teeshirts. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. My legs were like jelly, looking down was a disaster and going back wasn’t an option. The last task was to launch yourself into space 30m back down onto the Poop (luckily where none of mine had landed) and return safely to Earth.

What had happened earlier in the day in getting to Rochefort I can no longer remember. It’s all a blur. Had two pitchers of wine since the Great Rigging Nightmare so have just about recovered now.

Check out the orange helmets and they still have one more level to go up!

I’m hoping for a quieter day tomorrow!

I do have to eat my words – England lost tonight to Croatia in the WC semifinal. We watched the game with a few other woebegone England supporters in a small bar with a big telly. The usual England nail bighter ended in failure, outplayed by a more determined Croatian team. The French locals looked on with a superior smile and wished us ‘better luck next time my English friends’! We trudged back to the hotel in a sloth of despond and into the blast furnace which was our bedroom.

Anyway, enough about English football, here is some fabulous stuff about French architecture. Royan was partially destroyed by Allied bombing in WW2 as part of the liberation fighting. After the war the town was identified as a ‘ Laboratory of Research for Urbanism’ and as a consequence some of the buildings were constructed in the modernist style and made of the then new fangled material of reinforced concrete. The best example is the the Church of Notre Dame which was completed in 1958 and which is constructed entirely of concrete including the altar (excepting of course the 5000 sqft of stained glass windows!). The outline of the timber shuttering is still clearly visible on all the exposed concrete. The church is fantastic but, consistent with all the other churches we have visited so far in this trip, the scaffolders had arrived ahead of us and already some restoration work is underway.

Another building in the town in the modernist style is the Central Market which is also completely constructed from reinforced concrete. It is a 3 inch thick concrete skin resting on 13 peripheral supports allowing the whole internal space, which is 34ft high and 170ft diameter, to remain completely free of columns. It is like a parachute which has just landed, partially deflating and sinking to the ground. The food market inside was absolutely fantastic, bulging with lobsters, crayfish, oysters, splayed open rabbits with kidneys still attached, chickens with heads still attached, peaches the size of footballs etc.

Final architectural gem of the day – Le Phare de la Coubre – the fantastic 64m high red and white lighthouse which marks the entrance into the Gironde Estuary. It was put into service in 1905 and luckily didn’t fall down when we were in it. After climbing up the 300 sweaty, thigh-burning steps you get out at the top but it’s worth it for the view.

It has a 250W HMI lamp inside which flashes twice every 10 seconds. I am offering a special prize to the first person to tell me how far, in nautical miles, it’s light beam can stretch out into the Atlantic, and be seen. (Anybody that gets this perfectly correct has obviously cheated by checking Wikipedia and will be disqualified !). The prize is a chocolate replica of the lighthouse which might quite possibly have melted before we get back to the UK.

Here endeth the architectural lesson.

We left the scabby Norwegian Blue and the remaining menagerie behind and set off in the direction of Verdon Sur Mer which is the ferry departure point for the crossing of the Gironde estuary. Passed a couple of small seaside towns along the way and made an obligatory stop for a cold beer in a cafe overlooking the beach where you could watch all the other people go through the traumas of a day on the beach in the burning sun. These include:

Turn up at the back of the beach. Big decision – keep shoes on and flick sand everywhere or take them off and risk burnt soles on the baking sand.

Family faffing over where to set up camp despite the fact that the beach is a thousand miles long with no problem of over-crowding.

Having agreed a location, start the wrestling match with parasols that refuse to be erected in the stiff long shore breeze. We did see one scoot off fully erect down the beach for several hundred yards with its owner running after it waving his arms and shouting ‘Attention la parasol echappe’ to anyone who would listen. Luckily for him some brave soul threw himself bodily at the runaway multicoloured monster and effectively rugby tackled it and brought it to a halt before it wiped out his family encampment.

The kids just want to head off into the sea and merely dump whatever they are carrying and make a sprint beeline for the ocean rollers while mum and dad panic about who is going to finalise the completing the major encampment which is now under construction and who is going to run after the kids to stop them drowning.

Then there is the major faff about do I put cream on now or wait till I have been in the sea and put it on later. Will I burn in the interim? If I put it on later will I end up just rubbing the lotion all over my now sandy body and effectively rubbing myself with sandpaper.

And then there is the trauma of actually getting into the sea. Is it the dash and splash technique i.e. run in and throw yourself headlong into the surf and risk smashing your nose into the wet sand ‘cos the water wasn’t as deep as you thought – or the slow and steady approach inching gradually into the icy water slowly numbing every part of your body progressively up to your neck. The hardest part is nearly always the shoulders which up to this point have been burning in the sun and now have to submerged in the icy briny. People hunch their shoulders and try and make themselves as thin as possible somehow thinking the wave won’t get them but it always does. The chickens just turn round at this point and walk out of the sea, the remainder resign themselves to their fate and chuck themselves in.

Anyway we watched all this human drama unfolding from our slightly elevated position in a beach bar overlooking the surf, with a cold beer in hand and in the shade. Now that’s my kind of trip to the beach!

Eventually made the ferry from Verdon to Royan across the Gironde estuary which takes about half an hour. There was a short delay in the boarding process as about 10 matelots gathered round a winch onboard the ship which operated the hawser attached to the shore. There was a lot of Gallic arm waving and scratching of heads to try and resolve whatever the problem was. Eventually they all gave up and we all boarded and set off. The estuary is the largest in Western Europe according to Mr Wikipedia and is formed by the confluence if the Dordogne and Garonne rivers.

Spent the evening in a beachside restaurant watching the France v Belgium WC semi-final. The place was packed full of diners giving themselves indigestion as their team barely struggled to maintain their fragile 1-0 lead.

The final whistle came, the room rose to its feet as one and the roof came off. Lots of happy French people. The cycle ride back to our hotel was accompanied by a mass of honking car horns and noisy flag waving.

Just wait till they meet England in the final. That’ll wipe the smile off their faces.

( I write this before tonight’s England v Croatia game so may have to eat my words!).

Having cleared out my orifices of beach sand we set off northwards again up the west side of the Gironde estuary.

More pine forest – ho-hum very nice. The constant deafening din of the cicadas prompted Mrs Nelson to do some research. According to ‘national treasure’ Sir David Attenborough these critters are hatched underground and remain there for a staggering 17 years before emerging as a grub and climbing up a tree whereupon it metamorphoses into a winged creature leaving the outer eco-skeleton attached to the tree trunk. They then climb up the tree a bit further and rub their legs and flutter their wings making all this noise in order to catch a mate. This is one hell of a noisy orgy we are cycling through. Having mated the female flutters down lays more pupae in the ground and 17 years later they pop up and off we go again! Today we must have passed a billion of them which means that there are 17 billion just lurking about in the ground just being really really bored!

Dear reader, please note the three exo-skeletons in the above photo.

Arrived at the end of the day at our hotel very hot and very sticky. Hurrah it has a pool. Only 2 other people there so far less embarrassing than the Lacanau beach debacle. This hotel also turns out to be something of a walk-in menagerie. There are dogs and chickens roaming about plus a guineapig in a cage and 30 caged up birds including paroqeets, budgerigars, finches and other zany coloured birds. Breakfast was served in amongst this lot and the cocophony of cicadas was replaced by a din of twittering caged birds ( to be fair, the guineapig did stay very quiet). The vague stench of bird poo mixed with Trill and foetid water troughs slightly put me off my yoghurt and muesli and to add insult to injury I skidded slightly on some escapee parroqueet droppings. However the saddest spectacle of all (apart from the notable absence of scrambled eggs at the breakfast buffet) was the grey parrot who had pecked off all his feathers apart from those on his head (which, if you think about it, would be physically impossible). The short shambling woman who ran the place explained that it was just moulting and that it was perfectly normal. This sounded to me like a Michael Palin response to a dead Norwegian Blue complaint! But just look at the poor chap:

His mates in other cages looked distinctly healthier.

The reason why there was no blog published last night was because there was no internet. This famous menagerie hotel was also surrounded by ongoing road improvement works and the wonderful French contractors had dug through the phone lines hence WiFi blackout. I went to inspect the hole but could do nothing to fix the damage!