29th Apr DAX - HENDAYE PLAGE

“Mr Blue Sky, Mr Blue Sky” ................... Hoorah, it stopped raining at 2.00 a.m. and by 9.00 blue sky was showing through the clouds, our dispositions were much lighter today (we really are affected by the weather – SAD syndrome).

Sat Nav worked ok today and we were back at the coast by lunch time. The aire provides parking for 8 vans, there were already 14 parked up; so we tucked ourselves in and waited for someone to move. After waiting for a couple of hours we managed to park in an official parking space for the night, but lots more vans arrived after us; there’s too many vans and less and less spaces and it’s only April, I hate to think what it’ll be like in the summer.

France has far more camper vans on the road than Spain or Portugal, and lots of the ones we saw there were French. Initially we thought that camper vans were well cater for in France, the French aire book has 1600 entries compared to 47 (Portugal) and 91 (Spain) but there appears to have been a backlash over the last couple of years; many of the aires are closed, height barriers have been erected, free aires have meters and charge for water etc and, as in this town, all the parking close to the beach says camper vans prohibited. The aire at Cadillac had a notice that I roughly translated; the gist of it was “due to repeated exploitation the aire de service had been withdrawn”; so now when we set of in the morning we’re wondering how far we’ll need to travel before we can settle for the day.

Hendaye Plage is a surfer’s beach, with huge crashing waves; practically everyone you pass is wearing a wet suit or changing out of one. Fortunately we went for a walk around the town before lunch as it had started raining heavily by 3.00p.m and continued off and on for the rest of the afternoon.

We’ve been in France for 10 days now and not managed to get on the internet except for a one time parked outside MacDonald’s where we checked our emails (very slow) and last night when we remembered that our ‘Kindles’ had an internet setting – ha ha and we thought MacDonald’s was slow our poor old ‘Kindles’ ground to a halt, we could see we had messages, but we couldn’t open them – very frustrating. We’ll be back in Spain tomorrow, so hopefully we’ll start getting internet access and I’ll be able to post my blog again!

We had a distressing communication from the people we sold the farm to; gale force winds, this morning, have wreaked havoc at the farm - six trees down (through boundary fences), sheds blown over fence and down bank/field and our polytunnel cover wrecked, fortunately the house and cottage seem to be ok..