Travel Blog The webs original travel blog Dashboard Sign out Destinations Your Shortcuts: This is a draft. Publish this entry to make it visible to everyone. Edit Entry Edit Pictures All the world et sa femme The people at Travel blog have decided my blog breaks the rules - no idea why - so wont publish it and as I had written the damn thing I thought I may as well put it on here instead. You cant have it all - well not in August anyway! We have been struggling a bit lately to find decent places to stay that dont cost a fortune or arent fully booked. Everywhere is so busy with mostly French, Dutch and Germans and the odd few Brits. The municipal campsites of which we have been singing the praises are now a seething mass of people, tents caravans, motorhomes, bikes, children, dogs and cats (yes really, cats on leads) and as for Aires, well they are invariably full of massive motorhomes which look as though they are settled in for the foreseeable future - even if you are only supposed to stay for 24 hours. But I am getting ahead of myself so more of that later. It is ages since I last wrote an entry in the blog - mainly because the campsites we have been on have either not had wifi or you have had to pay for it, so a rather lengthy report follows We spent 3 days at the site at Carantec overlooking the site we stayed on one of our first visits to France with Vic, Tom and Alex about 12 or 13 years ago. Why not go there for old to times sake instead of looking down on it like we were in the cheap seats in the back row at a concert? Well, about 40 Euros is the answer. That was the difference PER NIGHT between our lovely spacious site on an organic farm and a small pitch on the all singing, all dancing, Les Mouettes. Lets face it we were never going to make use of all the facilities we were paying for - I may like to take a trip round the lazy river but I am not sure how many little children would have been harmed in the process and I may well have caused a small tsunami if I tried out the water slide! No, I think it was just safer (and cheaper) for us to look down on our exciting neighbour from our environmentally friendly location. Following our visit to a massive vide grenier (car boot sale) we have a new benchmark for whether something is expensive or not. For years we have watched the French at their fetes and festivals sitting at long tables eating whatever fare is on offer. Well now we are almost French, we thought we should join in. What could be nicer, a big plate of sausages and chips with the locals. Frites - 2€, Saucisse and chips 6€. Fair enough you might think.... Not when you only got one, measly, skinny sausage ! For 4€!! It amazing what you can get thats less than a sausage! Our next stay was a very short hop across an estuary to an aire we could actually see (with binoculars) from the Carantec site. We had looked at the mhs lining up on the quay side at St Pol de Leon and decided to join them as we had never visited the town. Aires are funny places, basically its just like being in a car park with a few feet between you and you neighbour. Someone was so keen to get in the front row on the harbour side that they sneaked between us and our neighbour which meant if I had wanted to I could have leaned out of my window and helped myself to something off their table! We left the aire to revisit one of the lovely beaches west of Roscoff driving through fields of artichokes to get there and discovering yet another wonderful municipal camp site. Big pitches, sea views, lovely hot showers all for less than the cost of 2 sausages a night! From Poulennou we headed for new pastures at Chateaulin - somewhere we had never visited but looked nice in pictures. Its not really very nice after all. It was hot and humid, very hot and humid in fact and the town basically grew around a crossing of the river Aulne which is part of the Nantes Brest canal. It is still a major crossing point so cars and lorries thunder though it constantly. We were quite excited though, as our French neighbour warned us that there were massive storms on the way with thunder, lightning and big balls of ice which we assumed were hail. Anyway the weather warning was enough to send him into a frenzy of pegging. Shame his efforts were wasted and we only got a few spots of rain - I was looking forward to something biblical and the big balls of ice would have gone well in my g&t (OK so I dont drink g&t but it sounded better than Pepsi Max) The heat was enough to send us off to the coast again and we headed for the Crozon peninsula. During a fruitless search for a reasonably priced site we stopped in a beach side lay by next to another mh. I soon heard Bert chatting away in English and went out to meet Maire who we soon learned was from Ireland and on holiday with friend Maura. Maire was a retired teacher and Maura had just 7 more weeks before she too retired from her school. Maire informed us that they had been staying in this beach side spot for years and it was regularly used by mhs. The night before there had been 5 and she urged us to join them. It was a lovely spot, with the beach literally on our doorstep so we decided on our first night of wild camping! We were invited for a nightcap by Maire and Maura with the words please come round but we dont stay up late Well, at 1.30 or so when we finally staggered home I wondered what they considered to be late! They were a very funny couple who had travelled extensively and had loads of hilarious stories about their adventures. I cant remember having laughed so much to ages. I seem to recall them calling me a feckin eejit at some point - I am not sure why but they were probably right! The downside of wild camping Id the lack of a good water supply and we desperately needed a good shower and some where to wash our, by this time, very smelly towels, so headed off for a site west of a Douarnanez which was in the Alan Rogers guide book. We knew it was run by an English couple but we didnt realise was that it was a small enclave of commuter land full of yummy mummies and former yuppies, with children called things like Zanthe and Epark, Everything on the site was immaculate and just a bit over the top - I mean, who ever heard of automatic soap and towel dispensers on a camp site? A far cry from our night on the side of a beach! Anyway it served its purpose, we showered in luxury and washed the clothes too, but it was all a bit too Middle-England-on-sea for us so we headed off again in the morning. From there we landed by pure chance on a lovely site at Treffiagat called Les Ormes. This was a really French site run in a no-nonsense way by a lady who only had to walk to the edge of the play area at closing time for all the children to scatter. This was a good place to stay with a nice swimming beach only 300 flat yards away. We could also walk to Guilvinec where I had a moment at the top of some very, very steep stairs which I should have known better than to climb. I did think I might have to live out my days on the viewing area created to allow visitors to watch the fishing fleet empty their catch, but fortunately we found another less precipitous way down. Off again after 3 nights at Les Ormes to find a new home and decided to check out the aire at Mousterlin plage which we expected to be full but thought wed have a look anyway. Thanks to a very nice French man who moved to give us more room we were lucky to get in and headed off to check out the beach. It was literally 2 minutes walk away and perfect! Aires are great places for people watching and we soon had names for some of our neighbours and an updated version of mutton dressed as lamb. Now, anyone who is not dressed suitably for their age is too old for their knickers after Bert waited with anticipation to see the glamorous woman who would return to the mh next door with the very flimsy lacy washing on the line only to be very disappointed - I say no more except that she was definitely too old for her knickers! Sad to leave after our 48 hour stay (maximum allowed) but interested to be heading for Raguenes which was the first place we went on a family holiday in France. Sites around there were very expensive but there was a recommended aire at Never. Sadly when we got there our prospective pitch was occupied by a lion and a tiger - yes, the circus was in town and it had set up on the aire. We finally settled on an aire for 5 which was in the corner of a very large car park next to a village called Kerascoet, famous for its street of thatched cottages, and we were soon joined by four other mhs. Perfect, its not considered sensible to spend the night on your own - safety in numbers and all that! Unfortunately one by one the other vans drove off leaving us very lonely in the giant car park. The night was eventful - first off we had no sooner turned off the lights than Bert decided there was a mosquito in Bronwyn so we then spent ages finding it. Lights off again - another mosquito - another long search before we finally despatched that one too. Lights off then people wandering around the car park, then cars driving around the car park all night. Why would people be driving around a rural car park in the middle of the night? Who knows, but it wasnt very restful as you can imagine. We were once again in need of a good shower and somewhere to do washing and we ended up at Le Pouldu (another previous holiday destination) and at Les Embruns, the same site we once stayed at. Both the town and the site have grown tremendously but it was nice to see them both again. Our search for a longer term stay continued, and still does. All the nice sites seem to be remote from towns or beaches while the ones which are close to attractions are currently cramped, crammed and expensive. We spent a night on a municipal site at Gavres next to one of several massive German gun emplacements which lined the site (which did seem a bit incongruous) and then, having visited a number of sites which were full, ended up in desperation on Camping a la Ferme at Plouharnel which could have been nice but had turned into a graveyard for old caravans. Still, it was only 8€ and watching the comings and goings of the various inhabitants was entertaining, in fact, on reflection it was more fun than the much swankier camping Beausejour at Quiberon where we spent the next night. Now at another Camping a la Ferme near Sarzeau which is a nice site which boasts a beach a mere 800 metres away. Not bad, we thought. Whats 800 metres if you can spend the day on a lovely beach reading, swimming and listening to the test match? Well, not quite. We walked to the beach last night full of anticipation that we had found somewhere we wanted to stay. Beach....? Frankly if I had to spend my holiday on a beach like that then I would stay at home. It was more like a grubby storage yard at Travis Perkins where gravel and dirt had been swept into a pile onto which hundreds of people from the adjoining camp site had been dropped from a great height. I am obviously getting too fussy in my old age but to me a beach should have sand or at the very least waved washed pebbles rolling under a turquoise sea! My guess is that the sites by those beaches are full of the Germans and the Dutch - lets hope this particular invasion is soon over. Pictures: Berts new friends, our first wild camp site, all alone in a car park, Benodet
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 10:36:19 +0000
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