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Thursday, 3 May 2012

28th Apr CADILLAC - DAX

Woke up to rain again! It’s worse than Wales; at least there we could dry our coats and do our laundry. We waited for the rain to stop so that we could go to the market – it didn’t, but we went anyway. It was exactly how you picture a French market; there was lots of home grown fruit and vegetables for sale, homemade (goats) cheese, charcuterie and livestock – goslings at 11 and four week old chicks 260. There was one stall (vegetables) where the man was drinking a bottle of red wine (10.30 a.m.) he was very jolly. I even saw a couple of men wearing berets!

Our aire was 90 miles away, thanks to Sat Nav we travelled 120 miles; she had nearly got us to our destination (according to her). Brett was saying “this can’t be right” as we’re driving down smaller and smaller roads (tracks), me saying “no, it looks fine” (I was checking her route and it looked as if we were nearly there), when she suddenly says “recalculating, make a U turn” –her screen was showing our correct destination with the flag a few hundred feet away, then it disappeared and we were left with a screen of ‘unpaved roads’ miles from anywhere. When we re-entered the coordinates for the aire (we used the same ones we’d been following up until that point, they were saved in ‘favourites’) it was 10 miles away – what was that all about?
Anyway her detour was quite interesting; at one point we were stopped by the Gendarmes, a big tree had fallen across the road (we think it was due to the flooding, the roots had been washed away) so we had to wait while it was moved and we saw fields and fields of ducks – they were having a whale of a time in the puddles, I don’t think they normally have access to water (except to drink).
It’s now rained constantly for 24 hours; after we arrived at the aire we waited and waited for it to stop, so that we could explore and go to buy food, in the end we had no choice but to venture out in the wet. Dax is a spa town, we saw the steam coming off the thermal waters but we couldn’t touch it, as it was behind a high metal fence, you obviously have to pay to get in and it wasn’t open at 8.30 0n a Saturday evening. We were parked close to the river, there was supposed to be a floating restaurant near the aire but we didn’t see it; the river was very swollen, there were steps leading down to a riverside walk the water was halfway up them and the walkway was well below the water level.

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