Packing the Tent

Sadly we had to pack up on Friday. I know I said we wanted to visit the beach before we started packing, but I have to say that we got to about 12 o'clock and decided that we may as well start packing, because we still had to make it to Poitiers by 1800 that evening. We had decided, a few days before, that since we'd enjoyed the small hotel in which we spent the overnight stop en route, we'd phone ahead and book a couple of rooms for ourselves for the route home, but I'll get to that later.

We started de-camping in much the usual way - kick the bungs out of the blow-up beds, stuff sleeping bags into stuff sacks, locate interesting things in pockets of the tent you can't remember having put there, and decide which clothes belong in which bags. Because the tent is the largest, heaviest thing, it needs to be one of the first items loaded into the boot - anything underneath it runs a huge risk of being crushed! This means that the last thing you can actually take down in the camp needs to be the first thing put into the car, and so everything else starts to litter the camp site while you get to the point where the tent can actually come down. Which probably wouldn't be so bad except that this time the campsite was incredibly sandy! We have done what our parents complained about all those years ago - we've brought home half the ruddy beach!

We finally got to the point where Lottie and Lizzy were going round pulling out pegs (I'd pegged down every guy rope I could find!) and Emma was unhooking the pods inside (note to tent manufacturers - if a space in a tent is described as able to sleep two, it really MUST be big enough for two single blow up mattresses), while I packed the roof box.

And then it was time to roll up the tent and put it into the bag. Oh dear! Well, that didn't happen. Two hot, dusty, sweaty attempts later and the bag was mostly zipped up, so we decided we'd unroll it at home, and try again there.

And so the car packing was taking shape. You know, I'm really proud of how we managed to pack - 5 people in the car, with a roof box, and while we all had loads of stuff, I still had a clear view out of the back of the car!

So that was us - it took us quite a lot longer to pack than we'd anticipated, so I was rather glad I'd called and reserved rooms at the hotel - I said we'd arrive between 18:00 and 18:30, and we managed that comfortably. I know Poitiers isn't far up the country from Bordeaux, but we were never going to get going early in the morning. We didn't have the same room as on the way down, although Emma and Neisha did. The girls and I had a nice room with a double bed and bunk beds - which, for some reason was really exciting for them! I was delighted when the hotel lady told us that she'd sort us out some supper, so we were able to get our steaks! And because we didn't have to drive anywhere, Emma and I shared a very nice half carafe of rose wine.

Sunburn and Hot Showers

Yesterday was hot. We're talking really HOT! Despite the high, wispy clouds covering the sun most of the time, we were hotter than we've been at any time in the holiday so far, so it's little surprise that both Lottie and I managed to catch the sun a little. Lottie, as usual, has been extremely careful with making sure that she's completely covered in factor 50, while I have used factor 50 over everything except my legs, in some vain attempt to de-pastify them. It was not however, my legs which got burned, it was my nose. Now everyone is calling me Rudolph, and humming Christmassy songs at me! Extra factor THERE today!

As usual, we stayed on the beach until the life guards took down the swimming flags at 7pm, and having had two days of cold showers, I walked, with Lizzy, to a different shower block (in fairness, we do appear to be equidistant between two blocks), and succeeded in having the first warm shower in three days! Oh, the pleasure! I returned to our pitch to find Emma ecstatic about her shower, having gone to our usual block and spending an extra 10 minutes (yes, you read that right) in the shower because we've finally got hot water again!

For the rest of the evening, after an unhealthy supper of hot dogs, we went round to our new German friends for a rematch at Kniffle (I believe it's called Yahtzee in England). I had, the night before, while Sina was teaching me how to play, managed to beat everyone. I protested vehemently that it was clearly a case of beginners luck, but Sina insisted on a revenge match, and I subsequently lost! Oh well. Since we're planning to go to the beach to roast marshmallows this evening (WITH Sina and Roman), there'll be NO chance I can get my own revenge. sigh


Emma and Neisha had an attempt at sleeping on the beach last night, but I gather returned at 4 this morning because Neisha was cold. Given the feebleness of her sleeping bag, this is not really a surprise! Mind you, a 3 season bag is usually not necessary at Truc Vert!

So today is the last full day, as we'll be heading off tomorrow afternoon (I plan to go to the beach in the morning before we pack up and leave!), and would you believe it? It's GLUM! Still, there's a chance my nose will revert to just normal colour in this, and the Christmassy songs will cease!

Sardines and Cold Showers

Since it's now the last week of July, I suppose we can expect that there will be more people on the camp site. To our delight, the people in the next pitch who seemed to have taken agin us for no readily apparent reason, and would stride across the middle of our pitch, ignoring any kind of social convention or personal space, have finally gone - we fell short of a rousing cheer as they left, although it did occur to us!

However, the number of people being squeezed into the campsite, and onto pitches barely big enough to take their tents has made me feel, again, somewhat guilty for the sheer size of our pitch. We don't actually have a place to park, our pitch not actually having direct access to the roads in the site, but we have truckloads of space!! I'll get pictures. So when a group of 7 chaps was shoehorned into one of the pitches adjacent to our own, I had to keep mumbling to myself "I booked - this is what they gave us - I have NO influence over where we get stuck, you know!"

All these new people, however, seem to have had an adverse affect on the facilities, so that on our return from the beach, somewhat closer to 7 than I'd thought we were going to come back, the showers were cold. It's rather like getting into the water of the surf - your body's hot, so the shower feels that much colder - brrrr!

However, the reason we were so late back from the beach was that the surf was truly awesome! The beach was packed with sun-bathing bodies as far as the eye could see, but still they kept arriving, and so the little patches of privacy (on a beach - are you kidding me?) kept getting smaller and smaller. I'm afraid the mother in me took over at one point as I guerilla sun-factored a young man who was, it transpired, wearing some kind of sun cream with SPF-0 (he showed it to me) written on the bottle! His shoulders were burning, and despite his eye-rolling, I slapped on a bit of cream.

But back to that surf - you didn't need to get very far in before you were being bowled over by every other wave. Lottie and Lizzy were squealing like, well, girls, as they tried to escape the clutching fingers of surf racing up the beach. Every so often one of them would disappear beneath a particularly large wave, come up gasping for breath, and launch herself right back into the water.

Thankfully the glum weather we've been suffering from (and let me tell you, there's NOTHING to write about on the days we don't visit the beach) seems to have moved on, and while there are a few clouds, we're having the blistering heat we'd expect at this time of year in this camp site. As I came away from the beach just before 7 this evening, I could still feel the burn of the sun on my shoulders.

Electricity

A little crie de coeur this morning from Emma and Neisha, in their pod watching Videos had me researching why our electricity supply had failed.

After testing the 4-gang extension (yes, this year I did bring European converters - do you THINK I'm stupid?) in the loos, I established that the problem lay in the 10m supply with the camping plug attached (yes, I also tested the supply at the outlet, by unplugging our neighbours supply and using that for a second or two). A call to Andrew back home convinced me that I had the power to work it out!

In the absence of any kind of obvious screw to open up the wound up end of the 10m supply, I thought I'd best start with the camping plug end, where I promptly hit paydirt! Turns out that when our new neighbours had pitched their little tent, they'd managed to pull our power supply a little - Lottie'd pushed it back in, but on opening up the plug we found that the brown (live) wire had disconnected completely. It was the work of moments to re-attach the wire in the correct place.

I know it's nothing really, but I'm feeling pretty good about myself!

Bugs

You have to expect, when you're on a camping holiday, that there'll be a few bugs.

We discovered, within a few hours of arriving in our pitch that we're somehow host to a nest of wasps rather closer to the camp than we're completely comfortable with. We've managed to come up with a, possibly daft, way to deal with them. A little syrup into a bowl placed a little way from the table keeps the wasps (and indeed many of the other bugs) away from our food.

Less easy to deal with was the very large beetle who'd managed to wander into the tent and was clinging firmly to the side near the girl's pod. Thankfully our German neighbour seems to be a man of imagination, and a cup and a plate later the bug was scuttling off into the undergrowth – in the OTHER direction from the tent.

The European hornet on the beach was quite a trick, as it happens. I knew nothing about this bug until a kindly gentleman was pummelling it to death beneath his croc shoe. I decided to dig up the little beastie, in the hopes of being able to identify it. I'm not sure you can imagine my shock on finding that the creature was still alive, and actually attempting to claw it's way out of the sand. I'm very sorry to say that the squeals of 4 panicking females is quite hard to resist, and so I re-buried the little beastie. A quick google later and I found that far from being the indiscriminate stinging machines I'd been led to believe, these gentle giants are, in fact, quite shy, leading me to believe that this one had been lured to the beach by the smells of discarded ice-cream wrappers. There's a part of me that hoped it survived it's re-burial, and flew back to it's nest to live a long and happy life. There is, however, a huge part of me that doesn't believe that's possible. 

iPad

OK, I was rather expecting that the campsite would be awash with iPads, you know, so it's been a huge surprise (massive) to find that until this morning, I saw nary a one!

Sadly when I did finally see one, and stopped to chat with the owner, he and it were both guarded by a blind, and somewhat grumpy mutt, who wouldn't let me talk to the owner of the iPad, or attempt to make friends with herself. All attempts were met with teeth (thankfully no skin was broken - no tetanus or rabies jabs for me!) and snarls.

Poop!

Equipment

One thing you find yourself doing while on a holiday like this, is to think about what you'd like to bring with you next year. As previously discussed, I want a fridge of some sort – Argos will sell me a mini fridge in either white, pink or pink spots for £19.99, and for a very little more, I can get a lovely “Hello Kitty” version. All of these will hold 6 cans of drink (apparently this is a 4 litre fridge), and should manage to keep butter and milk cool during the holiday. And then you find yourself thinking – “Yes, that's all very well, but for just a tiny bit more than that, I can get a 6 litre fridge...”

And then there's a broom. You see, I've got a brush (I think there may have been a dustpan once, but that's long gone), but actually it'd be nice to NOT have to bend down to brush out the tent.

And an awning/gazebo type thing, so that when it rains I can cook under cover, and not have the rain dripping down my neck.

I mean, most of the ideas I had for this holiday have been OK – obviously the fridge idea would have been better if I had done some long term testing of the 12-volt socket, to see if, on extended use overheating would occur and the thing would cut out in an annoying manner. As it happens, you can get a block of ice down at the shop, and as luck would have it, on our way up the hill today we found a random block of ice melting on the side of the path, so we picked that up and shoved it into the fridge. Milk and butter doing the NOT melty thing by the end of the lovely hot afternoon. The clothes rail was definitely a good thing, although persuading the girls to actually hang their clothes up on it is proving a bit more tricky than I'd expected.

And, I'll have you know, those “stupid” solar glow lights that everyone said were a complete waste of money have actually been more use than you'd expect – since I got 4 of them, they provide sufficient light in the tent at night to help anyone wanting to go the the loo, or, as happened, find the tent when stumbling home a bit later on. Bringing last year's roll mats to use as entrance mats on which to deposit shoes on the way into the tent hasn't been a total failure, either.

In fact, those "stupid" solar lights are SO bright that when Emma and Neisha came in last night and failed to turn them off before going to bed, the light was bright enough that when I woke early, they stopped me going back to sleep.